Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Baroness Winterton of Doncaster Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I am going to have to reduce the time limit to four minutes if we are to have any chance of getting everybody in. I remind Members that, if they take interventions, they should take them within the time limit. I know it is difficult, because we have a lot of speakers, but if those who did not put in to speak intervene, it prevents those who did put in to speak from making their speeches. I am sorry about this, but I will reduce the limit to four minutes, and if people take interventions, please try to stay within the limits that we have set.

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[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

Members of Parliament right across this House—certainly my colleagues representing constituencies in London—will know that most of the casework we receive relates to housing. A secure and safe home is the most basic need that is denied to far too many. The Government repeatedly talk about levelling up, but, knowing this need, they continue to fail on all fronts those who are most in need.

The proposed leasehold reforms mean that new leaseholders will not be subject to high and escalating ground rents, but what about the 4.5 million existing leaseholders? Just look at safety and security. The Government have promised to protect leaseholders from cladding costs no less than, I believe, 17 times, but we are now four years on from Grenfell and up to 11 million people are still living in homes with unsafe or unsuitable cladding. Leaseholders continue to be hit by profiteering at every single stage of this scandal. As well as having to pay to remove dangerous cladding at their own expense and all the other safety issues that have now arisen, this Government continue to fail them as they are hit with sky-high insurance premiums and extortionate waking watch costs.

This issue affects an estimated 12,000 people across Lambeth alone, where my constituency is. It is very clear that the Government must provide upfront funding to make these homes safe, and be clear that neither interim nor remediation costs will fall on leaseholders. But again and again, this Government fail to deliver. That is why I am so pleased that Labour has tabled an amendment to set binding targets to remove all cladding by June 2020 and to protect leaseholders from these costs. If the Government want to actually keep a promise for once, they might consider walking through the Lobby with us today.

We certainly need more housing and the capacity to build it. We need so much more right across the country, but at what cost? Handing more power to developers, reducing the amount of real affordable housing—not what we currently call affordable—and taking power away from local government does not make much sense to me. Social housing providers have already expressed concerns that these changes to planning will actually reduce housing affordability. I do not understand how that is levelling up.

The Local Government Information Unit says that the changes would

“leave local government with the political liability on planning whilst depriving them…of the powers to manage it effectively.”

From planning to leasehold reform, I just cannot see how this Government can reconcile what they call building safe and affordable housing with these measures, which leave many with a guarantee of neither.

As we come out of this pandemic, the Government will have missed a major opportunity: their own target to decarbonise by 2050. Even doing this by 2050 is not good enough, so why are there no specific measures in the Queen’s Speech about driving forward all our plans on protecting the environment? We have so little time and we should be doing so much more as a country.

I was extremely disappointed to find that the Queen’s Speech did not specifically provide more funding for homelessness. I would like to see the Everyone In scheme turned into long-term policy. We saw how much we were able to deliver during the pandemic for those who are homeless. Ultimately, we should be removing the Vagrancy Act 1824, which criminalises the homeless, and doing all that we can to support them. Under this Government, buying a home has become the preserve of the rich, and nothing in the Queen’s Speech is doing anything to change that.

Overall, the legislative proposals in the Queen’s Speech and the laws that have already been put forward, including the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021 and the spy cops Act—the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021—all point towards a new type of authoritarian Government. I certainly did not expect this Government to be a champion of civil rights, but all this put together is something else. From the Bill that will disenfranchise millions of voters by barring those—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I am afraid that the hon. Lady’s time is up.

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[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con) [V]]

I note that we, Madam Deputy Speaker, have just entered our 25th year of service in the House. In all that time, I have been clear that there is no more important issue to the residents of the constituency of Reigate than planning. Crucially, the protection of our environment hangs on the fact that we are London’s green belt.

I just want to pose a couple of warnings for my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench. They might have noticed that in the last set of local elections only the Borough of Reigate and Banstead remains a district or borough council in Conservative control. These cases almost always turn on people feeling disenfranchised and remote from the planning process. Unless things change, it is only going to get worse. There is also the issue—despite our right hon. Friend the Paymaster General’s machine-gunning at the Dispatch Box of the deputy Leader of the Opposition—of the noise around the developer connection with the Conservative party. The delivery of a developer-led system of house provision will haunt us in future if we do not address it.

I want to point my hon. Friend the Minister to the comments made by our hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) about enabling a plan-led system. If the local authority is coming forward with its own plans, of course it should not need planning permission. The local authority will have produced a plan, which developers would then bid to build.

Within that, however, we need a more important national debate about where housing is to go and about how we are to deliver levelling up so that we can get good houses, good jobs and good infrastructure in those parts of the country where people have drifted away—provincial towns in the midlands and the north—to seek employment elsewhere. I draw my hon. Friend the Minister’s attention to the excellent article in The Times today by our former leader, our noble Friend Lord Hague. We need to address the levelling-up agenda, and we can do it within the planning system, but if we do not, we will be in the deepest trouble, because we will not be able to deliver our principal political objectives.

I want to make two other points. First, I draw the attention of my hon. Friend and his colleagues in the Department to the concern about the building safety fund and how it affects the leaseholders of Nobel House. I have written to the Secretary of State urgently, and I have now had two letters from his colleague, the noble Lord Greenhalgh. Unhappily, the last letter, which arrived today, was in response to my letter to the Secretary of State of 17 December 2020—I did have a previous response to a letter I sent a month later—but this is now absolutely urgent. These leaseholders are in the deepest trouble because of the failure of Avon Estates properly to register a claim for the building safety fund and, indeed, for the waking watch fund.

Finally, on another element of the Queen’s Speech, the welcome ban on conversion therapy lacks any detail on how it will work. The accompanying notes imply that people who are inflicting it at the moment might get protected. We need assurance on that very shortly.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Nominations closed at 5 o’clock this afternoon for candidates for the post of Chair of the Backbench Business Committee. One nomination has been received, and a ballot will therefore not be held. I congratulate Ian Mearns on his re-election as Chair of the Backbench Business Committee.

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[James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)]

Back to housing, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I welcome the Queen’s Speech last week and remain very enthused by what lies ahead in the Planning Bill. There is no question but that the UK needs to build more affordable homes. In my humble opinion, we should all aspire to a much higher rate of home ownership so that everyone can take an equity share in their future. Having a place to live that we call home is surely one of the most fundamental rights that we have.

The Government are really investing in this. We have a new £11.5 billion affordable homes programme, a new mortgage guarantee scheme, discounts for first-time buyers, the abolition of section 21 of the Housing Act 1988 on no-fault evictions, the extra £140 million in discretionary housing payments, plus much more. It is a good news story.

However, the thrust of my argument today is that while there is a clear need for new housing, it needs to be in areas that have the capacity to absorb it. To put it bluntly, it cannot be at the expense of the quality of life that our constituents enjoy, notably in the south-east, and it must not include building on the green belt, eroding what is left of our open spaces or ripping the heart out of our rural communities. I therefore urge the Government to take note of what my constituents in Bracknell and Wokingham are telling me.

In Bracknell Forest, a total of 1,688 new houses were built last year, a 123% increase over the previous year. Of those, 404—23% of the overall target—are affordable homes, with 125 for affordable home ownership and 279 for affordable rent, as well as 107 new houses for the elderly. So we are doing it, but it is wrong that councils should be forced to build on whatever scraps of land are left over. It is a similar picture in Wokingham, where the council was almost powerless to stop the activities of speculative developers.

I therefore urge the Government please to consider the following. The ripping up of the Lichfield table was a welcome step, but I would now propose a new formula that focuses on residual land availability as a percentage of the total area. If there is nothing left in a constituency except for residual farmland, golf courses or school playgrounds, do not build on it. We must also build on urban and brownfield sites, and we should build up, not out. Areas such as the midlands, the north-west and the north-east are full of such potential development sites and investment is needed there.

I am led to believe that up to 1 million homes across the UK are currently unoccupied. Councils must make the best use of them. Permissions for a further 1 million homes have already been granted too, so let us do this with a time limit. We also need extra protections for farmland, so let us please impose punitive and progressive taxes on those who seek to build on what is left of it in our constituencies. To be frank, the net zero argument is daft. If we concrete over trees, fields and hedgerows and then plant a few daisies, do not be surprised if the oxygen stops flowing.

We must allow our councils to honour existing local plans and not have extra targets forced upon them. We need to allow them the autonomy to say no and give our communities a proper voice. Democratic consent must therefore be implicit in any new Bill, and it must not become a weapon for the big state. Finally, there is no moral justification for concreting over our green and pleasant land with yet more dark satanic mills. Not only will we continue to haemorrhage loyal voters who have simply had enough, as we saw last week in the council elections, but we will never get that land back, so let us please ensure that the Planning Bill becomes what we would wish it to be.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

In order to accommodate all speakers who have applied, after the next speaker I will reduce the time limit to three minutes.