Sarah Newton
Main Page: Sarah Newton (Conservative - Truro and Falmouth)
Andrew George
My hon. Friend is right to suggest that we need a lot more social rented accommodation, but much of the pressure on that accommodation is from people who might otherwise get on to the intermediate rung of the housing ladder. I am keen that we should develop that. The problem is the lack of mortgage finance. Only three lenders are currently lending, and in order to get schemes to go ahead it is necessary to have all three lenders on a site. With that, of course, comes significant pressure for relaxation of the section 106 agreements, which often go alongside such developments.
Before I was elected I was a rural housing enabler before such things were properly invented. I was involved in many of the kind of developments that have taken place since the early 1990s as a result of what was then PPG3 and is now PPS3. We found exception sites. What I found then, and has been found since that time, is that it is easier to find exception sites where the development value is significantly less than £10,000 a plot. People were finding it a great deal cheaper than that in the early 1990s. Such sites could be taken forward in an environment in which the integrity of the planning system was maintained. Otherwise, the hope value on all those sites will be lost.
Rural exception sites—also known as departure sites—are sites beyond or close to defined settlements. Exception sites are acceptable for the provision of 100% affordable housing but not for the provision of open market housing. Often such schemes consist of fewer than 20 houses—more often than not, far fewer. It is very important indeed, , as PPS3 states, that:
“Rural exception sites should only be used for affordable housing in perpetuity.”
The problem is that there is pressure from some local authorities to weaken, or lessen, the pressure on that. I therefore urge my hon. Friend the Minister to ensure that the integrity of the exceptions approach in PPS3 is retained. That has been supported—I spoke to Matthew Taylor before he produced his report last year—by the Taylor review, the Affordable Rural Housing Commission, the rural housing trusts and all the housing charities that work in this field. It is vital that such sites provide affordable housing in perpetuity 100%. There is a risk that we might lose that.
I mentioned predetermination; I shall be interested to hear what the Minister says on that. There is concern among many elected members; they feel unable to campaign on the issue before they are elected, in case, once they have expressed a view about the way in which their local community might or should develop, it would restrict what they might be permitted to do on a planning committee. A statement on that would therefore be particularly helpful.
I mentioned housing benefit. In areas such as mine, where a large proportion of the local community live on the very margins of economic survival, because of the very high private rents those people often depend on the housing benefit system whether they are in or out of work. The problem is that the system as it operates at the moment still results in the withdrawal of housing benefit at the rate of about 85p in the pound earned for people in that situation. If that is the case, clearly there are a lot of people, particularly in areas such as mine, who are going in and out of work who suffer from that mechanism and a housing benefit system that does not take fully into account the difficulties of living at that level. As a result, a lot of people living in my part of the world, and many other places, are living in awful accommodation, which certainly does not meet national standards, and are often paying very high rents indeed.
In my area there are some excellent private landlords and the private rented sector is run extremely well, but of course there are some who do not run it as well as perhaps they should. For example, one family that I was seeking to help earlier this year during the very cold winter, who were living in a one-bedroom flat up some stairs and had a one-year-old baby boy—the mother had epilepsy—found themselves in and out of both accommodation and the working environment and were unable to maintain the housing benefit at rental levels. They found themselves under a great deal of pressure from their letting agent at the time. I will quote from a letter that the letting agent, Antony Richards Property Services, sent to my constituents, a Mr Shaun Burden and Ms Rosemary Jarmain, who were living in Morrab road at the time. They have since been housed by the council in accommodation in Newlyn.
The letting agent wrote:
“In the absence of any rent forthcoming and your apparent refusal to help yourselves by providing the information…we are left with no alternative but to seek to enforce the possession notice served last year…the Council will deem you as intentionally homeless and are highly unlikely to offer you accommodation. You will then be homeless.
The choice is yours.
I am told the streets are cold at night.”
Such treatment of local families in a desperate situation is not acceptable.
Adverts for Homechoice in Cornwall have shown that this week, of the 42 properties available, 14 are one-bed, 21 are two-bed, six are three-bed and one is four-bed. In Cornwall, there is a serious shortage of family accommodation—three and four-bed accommodation.
Andrew George
Because of time, I need to press on. I am terribly sorry.
I mentioned the issue of second home ownership and the need to control second home ownership in areas such as mine. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister is aware of the background in constituencies such as mine. For example, recent surveys of estate agents have shown that last year alone four times as many properties were sold to second home buyers as to first time buyers. In some communities a significant number—sometimes 20%, 30% or 40%—of the properties in local communities are owned by second home owners. Those circumstances make it difficult for people to have any chance of being able to afford a home of their own.
The previous Government looked at the issue following the Taylor review and other representations that I and others made. The then Government said that they were not prepared to look at our proposal to introduce a new use classes order to allow local authorities to restrict the number of second homes permitted to be converted from permanent residency to non-permanent residency in many of the communities where local people do not get a chance.
The previous Government said that they were not prepared to go forward because they thought that that would be difficult to enforce, but with council tax records, business tax records, the electoral register, capital gains tax information and local knowledge, I believe that it is possible to enforce that and to define properly what second homes are.
I mentioned the issue of capital gains tax. I hope that the Government will think carefully, before the Budget on 22 June, about the implementation of the changes in capital gains tax. I welcome the broad announcement, but I hope that there will not be an unintended impact on other business investments, including private letting properties, which are important to our communities. I hope that there will be roll-over relief, annual exemptions and other measures to ensure that the private letting sector is not hit detrimentally. I hope that the Minister is listening and I look forward to his reply.
Andrew Stunell
It is certainly in a better position to do so than the devisers of regional spatial strategies; I think that we can agree on that. We need to increase supply.
My hon. Friend has brought me neatly on to the abolition of regional spatial strategies, a phrase that has to be said carefully and articulated clearly. Regional spatial strategies have gone. The Secretary of State has written to planning authorities telling them that it is now a material consideration for them to take account of his letter saying that regional spatial strategies are to be disposed of. The legal decision must await legislation, but clearly we are there already. It is not just a question of telling local authorities, “You’re on your own”; there will be clear incentives for local authorities that permit the development of housing, and a reward system that will give them the opportunity to develop infrastructure and services to match the investment that they are allowing.
My hon. Friend had plenty to say about second home ownership. I have had the privilege of listening to him speak on the subject in debates for a number of years. He asked for some specific things. I cannot deal with capital gains tax—that is definitely well above my pay grade—but he also asked whether we could use the planning use class of second homes. The Government do not believe that there is a way forward on that. I would be interested—I do not suppose that I have the choice—to receive further representations from him and from others who think differently, but there are serious difficulties over how that can be done, not least because, for the first time, we are bringing the ownership of an asset into consideration of whether it was a material planning use or not. [Interruption.] I can see that my hon. Friend wants to engage in debate, and I look forward to doing so over the coming months.
My hon. Friend will have received a parliamentary response from the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), probably this afternoon, to say that we have no immediate plans to change the discount on council tax for second homes. However, my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives has raised some interesting issues, and some of us have great sympathy with them.
My hon. Friend asked about rural exception sites, and there seems to be a bit of a flurry: perhaps PPS3 and rural exception sites might, in some mysterious way, be at risk. I want to assure him that there is nothing in the coalition agreement or in the Conservative Green Paper on open source planning—I did not think that I would be likely to be standing at the Dispatch Box defending it—that would to change rural exception sites. The Government believe, as he does, that they are important and very material, so I hope that he accepts our assurance.
My hon. Friend rightly drew attention to the need to put in the missing rung in the ladder through the development of the intermediate market. Again, I refer him to the words of my hon. Friend the Minister at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors this morning. We are committed to supporting that intermediate sector and making sure that it flourishes. We want to promote shared ownership and help social tenants and others to own or part-own their home. Shared ownership is a way of helping lower-income households purchase a share in a home, perhaps for as little as 25%, which is what the current HomeBuy offer says.