Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Roberta Blackman-Woods and Boris Johnson
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
This has been a very interesting debate on the Bill, with an unofficial London mayoral hustings thrown in for good measure. We can clearly see how important housing is for Members from the fact that 48 Back Benchers took part in this debate. The hon. Members for Hornchurch and Upminster (Dame Angela Watkinson) and for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk), the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), and the hon. Members for Kensington (Victoria Borwick), for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) and for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry) made a number of interesting suggestions as to how to make the Bill’s proposals on the private rented sector and starter homes more effective, to negate some of the more centralising aspects of the Bill and to improve the quality of housing that is built. I hope we hear more from them in Committee.
Not surprisingly, given the severity of the housing crisis in London, we heard from a number of London MPs, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), my hon. Friends the Members for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), and my hon. Friends the Members for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), and for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry). They raised their concerns about how measures in the Bill will not deliver more genuinely affordable homes, will further socially segregate communities and will leave too many Londoners in high-cost, private rented housing with little hope of ever owning a home in the area in which they wish to live.
A number of Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe), the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), and my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds), for Workington (Sue Hayman), for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), for Redcar (Anna Turley), for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn), for Bootle (Peter Dowd) and for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), provided a very effective challenge to what the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) said about housing problems existing only in London. They spoke up strongly on behalf of their constituents, saying that more good quality, genuinely affordable housing in properly planned and mixed communities based on local decision making is needed everywhere and that the Bill represents an attack on social housing and does little to make home ownership a reality for many people on low and middle incomes.
As Members from across the House are well aware, we are facing a housing crisis in this country. We have the lowest level of home building since the 1920s, completions have fallen off a cliff edge since 2010 and the housing benefit bill is ever increasing. We have seen five years of failure from the Government, and on the basis of this Bill I fear that we are about to see five more. Home ownership has fallen every year since 2010, declining by more than 200,000, whereas under Labour the number of homeowners increased by 1 million. Between 1997 and 2010, we built almost 2 million homes. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) pointed out, in the year with the lowest number of homes built under Labour, 2009, we still built 125,000 homes. That is still more than were built in the year with the highest number of homes built under the Tories, which was 2014, when there were just 117,000 completions. Last year, the Tories built the fewest affordable homes for more than two decades—fewer than 11,000 homes for social rent compared with 33,000 in Labour’s last year in office.
Spending on housing benefit has risen by £4.4 billion since 2010, because of ever increasing rents. It is the same old Tory story: a 36% increase in homelessness and a massive increase in rough sleeping.
Dr Blackman-Woods
I am sorry, I would normally give way to the hon. Gentleman, but we are very short of time.
At least we on the Labour Benches recognise the scale of the task at hand. Current rates of house building in England are running at about half the level needed to meet existing and anticipated demand. We need to deliver an average of 240,000 to 245,000 homes per annum, of which 78,000 must be in the social sector, to meet housing need. That is a very long way from where we are at present, and measures in this Bill do little to address the task at hand.
Looking at right to buy, Labour is not against measures that would increase access to home ownership, but we have always said that the extension of the right-to-buy scheme to housing associations funded by the mass forced sale of affordable council homes is unworkable and wrong. It would lead to a severe and irreversible loss of affordable homes at a time when they are most needed, because there is no plan for a genuine one-to-one, like-for-like replacement.
According to figures estimated by Shelter, 19,000 council homes could be sold by 2020, with a further 113,000 at risk. In fact, since 2012, only one in nine council homes sold under the existing right-to-buy scheme has been replaced, so we can only estimate that the loss of socially rented stock will be substantial, with high-need areas of the country especially badly affected. The right-to-buy policy also leaves many questions unanswered, including whether all 1.3 million tenants will get the right to buy next year as promised.
We do of course also welcome the principle behind starter homes allowing those who can afford to do so to climb on to the property ladder. However, they are not, and should not be, a substitute for low-rent affordable housing. The proposals in the Bill to change planning obligations under section 106 agreements to prioritise the delivery of starter homes mean that they will simply replace the building of affordable rented housing.
There is a further problem with the starter home proposals. Put simply, starter homes are not affordable for many, even by the Chancellor’s own standards. A family living on the Chancellor’s new minimum wage of £9 an hour in 2020 would not be able to afford a starter home in 98% of the country.
The pay-to-stay measure to charge higher rents to some tenants is also extremely problematic. The very idea that a household income of £30,000 outside London, or £40,000 in London, is high is questionable at best, but as the income needed to sustain a basic standard of living varies hugely by household type—for example more income being needed for a family with two children than a single person—the proposals are ludicrous. We know from the Government’s own consultation that we are not the only people to think so. The Government’s 2013 consultation on pay to stay found that, even with much higher threshold levels, only 25% of respondents were in favour of the policy.
Labour supports measures in the Bill to crack down on rogue landlords and letting agents, but they fall far short of ensuring that England’s 11 million renters have a more secure, affordable home.
We wish to thank the Minister for adopting some of our proposals from the Lyons review, and the measures to speed up neighbourhood planning, to require local plans to be made, to streamline the compulsory purchase system and to prioritise building on brownfield land are to be welcomed. We have concerns about wider changes to the planning system and we will raise questions on them in Committee.
This Bill should be a Bill to tackle a crisis faced by thousands—a crisis in which people cannot afford a home, can barely afford their rents and, in the worst cases, are sleeping rough because they simply do not have a home. Instead, this Bill is an all-out assault on social housing, a smash and grab on council stock and a power steal from local authorities and councils. Under the previous Labour Government, home ownership increased, but it is falling now. The Bill does nothing to address five years of failure; indeed, it does not detail how a single affordable home will be built. Frankly, I am appalled that the Bill, which has 106 pages, does not mention homelessness once. We need a Bill that will increase the number of homes built across all tenures and I urge colleagues to vote for our reasoned amendment.