Housing and Planning Bill

Richard Bacon Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Miller]

My hon. Friend is right to raise that point, and I was very pleased to see the Minister, and I think the Prime Minister as well, underlining the importance of encouraging more small house builders to be involved, particularly in self-build schemes where they can increase the supply of housing far faster than some of the national builders.

Good building plans are not enough; there needs to be a watertight process to ensure that at each stage every home is built to standard. Few who buy one of the 200,000 new starter homes that the Minister is talking about today will be expert house builders, plumbers or electricians, and by definition none will have purchased a house before. If these people were buying a second-hand house—one that somebody else had lived in before—most would be relying on the professional services of a surveyor. They would therefore be relying on a professional who would give their potential new home a structural health check before the sale was completed.

For the most part, those buying new starter homes will not have that structural health check because it is a new house, a glossy, shiny, perfect new show home that the salespeople are promising them. They therefore think, “Surely there’s no need for a quality check. There are quality checks built into the processes, aren’t there? There are building regulations set out in law, building control performance standards, independent approved inspectors whose only reason to be is to safeguard quality—in essence to safeguard the buyer in this imperfect market.” Yet those who experience problems with new homes quickly discover that too many of those quality checks are not as watertight as they might at first appear. Independent oversight of the building process may not be working in practice as the rules and regulations might imply.

[Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)]

I am delighted that my right hon. Friend has given way, first because it is a pleasure to hear her speak. Every moment she speaks is a moment we do not have to hear from the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas), whom so many of us in the Committee heard droning on like an out-of-tune bagpipe for hours on end. Just by standing and speaking, my right hon. Friend is preventing the House from having to listen to him again, so I thank her for that.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the experience of many constituency MPs as they go about their work and listen to constituency complaints is that the existing process through the National House Building Council does not always provide the reassurance that people are entitled to expect? While it might a bit strong to say that the NHBC is the lackey of the large house builders, it is preciously close to being that.

[Mrs Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and pay tribute to him for the work he has done in helping more of my constituents have the opportunity to build their own homes. I did not have the pleasure of sitting across from the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas), although I am sure we will hear his dulcet tones later.

Many people who buy a new home will have problems with the house they purchase; they will have a snagging list—chipped paint, ill-fitting doors and so on. I do not deny the importance of getting such matters resolved, and the Minister may well want to address some of the difficulties people can experience in getting those small-scale problems fixed, but, as valid as those concerns are, that is not the point of this amendment. New clause 1 would ensure that every home was checked for significant defects while it was being built and at the end of the building process.

Over recent months, I have received evidence from people up and down the country who have purchased new properties with significant defects from major house builders. Some of those properties have damp-proof courses that are below ground level; some have been built off their foundations; and some have roofs sitting on walls that are not structural. There are also reports of inadequate fire insulation and an absence of cavity-wall or loft insulation. Those are real-life examples of defects in houses that are subject to the current regime. Every one of those building errors should have been picked up during the construction of the house, as part of the building control process. That process exists to ensure that houses are built properly. The approved inspector is responsible for building control performance standards and is, to all intents and purposes, the professional who acts as the eyes and ears of the future buyer.

As matters stand, however, there is no legal requirement for even one visit to be made to a new-build home during the build in order physically to check the building standards. On a new estate, a random selection of houses might be monitored and the results extrapolated as though every house were the same. This is called a risk-based approach, but in reality it feels like a lottery. The fact is that every house could be different. The subsoil across a 300-house estate can change dramatically, for example, and changes in the weather throughout the build can significantly affect materials and the way they work. The current risk based-approach creates an unnecessary lottery for the home buyer, rather than certainty. There is a calculated risk, which is not something that most buyers appreciate, and not something that most buyers would expect to accompany the purchase of a £200,000 or £300,000 house.

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[Tim Farron]

I am particularly grateful to have given way to my dad’s MP. On affordability, we all started somewhere. We might be fortunate enough to be homeowners, but people who are only just a bit younger than me belong to a generation where the average earner cannot afford to buy a home of any kind, so a starter home is a great blessing wherever it may be. I am not arguing against starter homes, but against a narrow definition whereby they are built at the cost of a larger number of genuinely affordable homes across the country. That is what my amendment seeks to address.

[Mr Bacon]

There is a fallacy that the hon. Gentleman adumbrated again when he said “at the cost of”. Why “at the cost of”? Why cannot local councils establish, grow and promote mutual housing co-operatives?

[Tim Farron]

I am in favour of those things too, but our understanding is that the starter homes initiative comes at the expense of—displaces—a larger number of homes built under section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 through other forms of planning gain. That is what the Government have stated since the election and since this Bill became a subject of discussion.

I am not somebody who ideologically takes a view in favour of private or publicly provided housing; in fact, my great problem is that too many people in this debate do take an ideological view one way or the other. I want to solve the crippling housing crisis in this country. That means building 3 million homes over the next 10 years, and to achieve that, the majority will have to be what we would refer to as affordable homes—social rented homes, shared ownership homes, and other homes with some form of restriction that allows them to be affordable to people on average incomes.

[Mr Bacon]

Why?

[Tim Farron]

Perhaps if the hon. Gentleman understood what the average earner earns and what the average home costs in the average place, he would not need to ask why.

[Mr Bacon]

Does not the hon. Gentleman understand that the word “affordable” is deeply tendentious—deeply laden? The reason things are not affordable is that there is not enough supply. Fix the supply, and we fix the affordability. It is perfectly possible to have exception sites for mutual housing co-operatives, or for self-build, which could be done on a large scale. Some 50% or 60% of housing is done that way in big countries such as Germany and France, and it could be done here. All it needs is a bit of imagination.

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[Mr Bacon]

Does the hon. Lady not think that the Labour and Co-operative party ought to be able to furnish advice without help from Her Majesty’s Government? Why has it not been doing that?

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

The hon. Gentleman is being uncharacteristically unfair. Many Labour Members argued strongly for more co-operative housing. In fact, I am sure the hon. Gentleman is very well aware that we had a whole section on the Lyons review that addressed this very topic. I think we are doing our bit.

Amendment 32 is really important. Indeed, the Minister himself acknowledged on a number of occasions that not only do we need homes as places to live in, but that they need to be built in communities that people want to live in. New homes have to be supported with the right infrastructure so that those who rent or purchase them have access to good quality healthcare, schools, further and higher education, transport links, employment and so on. It would be very useful to hear from the Minister this evening what he intends to do to address the concerns raised by a number of local authorities, including Milton Keynes, which pointed out that, because of the lack of community infrastructure levy applied to starter homes, there is a very real risk there will not be enough money available to support the infrastructure that is needed.

Amendment 33 would ensure that starter homes are affordable at locally determined rates of income and on a multiple of median incomes within the local area, rather than set centrally, which puts the homes out of the reach of many people, as my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) said. Homes that are priced at £250,000 outside London or £450,000 in London are simply unaffordable for too many people.

Amendment 34 seeks to exclude buy to let property from the definition of a starter home. In Committee, we thought this was a really, really important issue to address. We assumed the Government’s intention is for these to be starter homes for people and not starter homes for landlords. In Committee, we did not get the assurances we sought from the Minister. This is a straightforward amendment, and we would like to hear how he intends to give us the reassurances he indicated in Committee he would. At the moment, nothing has come forward.

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I agree with what Members have said about supply and demand. If no more homes are built than would have been built under section 106 but extra money goes into house purchasing, as is demanded by this starter home measure, the amount of money available to purchase homes will increase and the supply of homes will not. There is only one conclusion to be reached: house prices could eventually be driven up further. Members must seriously consider that conclusion. It would be helpful to know what the Government really think, but they have not produced an impact assessment.

[Mr Bacon]

I have a great deal of respect for the hon. Gentleman, who talks a lot of sense a lot of the time, but he is now suggesting that only a small number of developers can affect the situation. Does he not understand the central problem, which is that most ordinary people cannot make the decision to bring forward their own projects? If that changed, developers would find that people had other genuine choices. There is a reason why 75% of people do not want to buy the products of volume house builders.

[Mr Betts]

I agree, but I do not think that that is the issue in this instance, because by and large starter homes will be produced by volume house builders.

These homes will be built instead of other housing, and the Government are almost ignoring the right of local authorities to have an influence on the assessment of housing need. When the Minister appeared before the Select Committee, he said that it would be up to developers and local authorities to negotiate deals, including deals on starter homes, on the basis of individual sites and planning applications. How can that fit into a framework in which the Government have a target—I think it is a target rather than an aspiration; no doubt the Minister will tell us whether that is the case—of 200,000 starter homes? If the Government have a target, they will have to use their powers of direction to ensure that local authorities deliver starter homes on each site that will add up to the 200,000 total. In other words, they will override the rights of local authorities to assess housing need in their areas and arrive at the best deal on each site, so that the best possible balance of housing is available. Starter homes will simply push out the other houses for rent that local people really need.