Housing and Planning Bill

Scott Mann Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. The stamp duty will apply to the price paid for the property, so it will apply to that reduced price. That will provide a further benefit for people buying a new home.

We are absolutely determined to deliver the number of starter homes that we promised, in order to help first-time buyers, who were the worst-hit part of the homebuying sector in Labour’s great recession. However, in passing Lords amendments 8 and 9, the other place is seeking to stop us. This House should not stand for that. Those amendments would remove from the Bill the power to set a national starter homes requirement on housing sites. The other place has proposed to replace that power with a locally set requirement that would be effective only when local authorities had completed studies of local housing need and viability.

[Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)]

We hear a lot from local authorities about trying to secure rental properties, but we in this country have a right to own our own home and this Government are delivering that through this Bill. [Interruption.]

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, regardless of the comments from the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). My hon. Friend highlights why the Bill is so important. We cannot and should not have to wait for 336 different planning authorities to undertake local need and viability assessments before action on starter homes can be taken. These amendments would hit the very people we are trying hardest to help. First-time buyers would see their chance of home ownership kicked firmly into the long grass yet again by these proposals. That might be what Labour wants, but it is not what we want.

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[Dr Blackman-Woods]

As the hon. Gentleman will know, Labour produced more than 1 million more homeowners during our time in government. This Bill shows that the current Government have no long-term housing plan for the country.

[Scott Mann]

Does the hon. Lady accept that the reason private rents are increasingly high is that we have not built enough homes?

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[Scott Mann]

The House will probably be aware that I am passionate about home ownership and about helping people on modest incomes to be able to afford to buy their first home. In fact, such is the interest that I have taken in housing that I am referred to as a housing spokesman by my Cornish Conservative colleagues, and for that I am thankful.

For more than a quarter of a century, housing policy has failed the people of Cornwall. Thanks to this Government, we now have a number of approaches that will change that, including the introduction of starter homes, Help to Buy, the newly announced £19 million self-build project for the south-west, and continuing discussions with lenders about affordability. We now finally have a number of policies in place that will help the Cornish working population own their own home.

Many colleagues across the House will know the amazing feeling when you buy your first home—the sense of pride and achievement when you get the keys to the front door. It is one of those first big steps in life, like being accepted to university, getting married or having your first child.

When the Bill first appeared in this House back in October, the Government had clear goals to build more homes for a growing population and to reform the planning process. That included 400,000 new homes by 2020; 200,000 starter homes; the extension of right to buy to housing association tenants, turning generation rent into generation buy; and speeding up the planning process.

Since then, I have had many conversations with councillors in Cornwall who have been concerned about certain aspects of the Bill, including the right-to-buy policy and making councils sell off their high-value council houses. That policy could result in coastal communities in Cornwall losing very important social housing stocks, unless like-for-like replacements are built. I therefore welcome amendments 42A, 44A and 44B to clause 2, which were tabled in the other place by Baroness Williams and which allow some flexibility to the under-40 cap for purchasing a starter home. Some people over 40 are still looking to buy their first home—many of them in Cornwall—and certain exemptions will benefit couples where both are over 40 and have a right to buy their first home.

To give those starter homes some security, the Government’s Lords amendments 2 and 3 to clause 2 will introduce a minimum age of 23 to buy a starter home, which is a good policy. It will prevent abuse of the system by those who would try to buy a starter home with a 20% discount by using a young person or a student who otherwise would not intend to buy one.

Turning to part 4 of the Bill, I want to address amendments relating to high-value local authority housing. The initial announcement that councils would be made to sell off such housing caused concern in Cornwall, because the county has a high level of coastal communities where properties have, through no fault of those communities, increased significantly in value in recent years. The selling off of high-value council assets would have resulted in a reduction in the number of homes available to people on low or modest incomes, and would likely have increased second-home ownership. That would have been bad not only for local families but for local communities, as families would have moved to urban areas, thereby bringing about a decrease in local trade.

The Government’s Lords amendment 53 replaces the term “high value” with the term “higher value”, which will introduce a much more local approach, as housing prices differ from area to area. A council house worth £400,000 may have been deemed worthy of selling off, given that that figure is very high compared with that for a council house in an inland urban area. Without protection, communities could suffer.

Local people in coastal communities should not have restricted access because of where they grew up. I am therefore very pleased that the Secretary of State and Baroness Williams acknowledged concerns about the issue and made changes accordingly to give more freedom to local authorities over how they classify their higher value council homes.

I will not address other amendments now, because I want fellow Members to have the opportunity to speak. Suffice to say that the amendments I have touched on strengthen the Bill; illustrate the Government’s commitment to addressing the housing and planning challenges of the modern age; and ensure that rural communities are better protected while we drive towards more affordable homes throughout the country.

[Ms Buck]

I make no apologies for returning to the issue of London, because that is where housing need is sharpest and where the affordability crisis is most severe.

I find myself in the rare position, for one night only, of being in some harmony with Westminster City Council—a rare thing indeed. Its policy and scrutiny committee’s report on the Bill is deeply fascinating. It makes it clear—in moderate tones, but its content is unmistakable—what it thinks about the Bill and how it will impact on housing supply. Following on from a point made by my hon. Friend the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, it says:

“The Bill is largely a framework”,

which I think is a euphemism for, “We have no idea how most of it is going to work.” That point of view was spelled out more sharply by the Public Accounts Committee—whose Chair is not in her place at the moment—which absolutely stripped away the pretence of the calculations on which high-value sales have been predicated. Westminster City Council itself, however, is clear that the Bill will have a severe impact on housing and that it will also have wider implications, which I will address in a moment.

We do not know what the redefinition of sales from “high value” to “higher value” will mean for local areas. When Shelter did its initial calculation, it found that Westminster was likely to have to sell off 76.3% of its council properties as they became vacant. That would mean a sale rate of 246 a year. We do not know—as we keep saying about this Bill—what the new calculation will mean. The Minister has offered no calculations. The council’s latest estimate, however, is that it will need to sell 200 high-value voids a year in order to fund the right-to-buy housing association properties and that that will be worth £100 million year.

Here is the rub: not only will that reduce the stock and have massive implications for meeting housing needs, but it will simply displace costs into other areas of public expenditure. Westminster City Council has said that that will result in additional costs of £1.5 million a year for temporary accommodation for homeless families. The local taxpayer already has to fund temporary accommodation to the tune of £4 million a year above what the Government pay. An extra £1.5 million will be needed to meet some of the costs of homelessness that will result from the fact that the council will not be able to place people with housing need in its council or housing association stock because it will have been sold off in order to fund the right to buy.

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[Brandon Lewis]

I know that my hon. Friend has campaigned hard and has made her case strongly in the House. However, if a neighbourhood plan is in place, we must trust our elected representatives, who are locally accountable through the local authority, to make the right decisions for their area—ultimately, they are accountable to their area—and to make sure that their decisions are in line with the neighbourhood plan. We intend to make sure that that process is entirely transparent. I should also make it very clear to the House that when we looked at what is happening at the moment, we found that decisions made by local authorities are in line with neighbourhood plans.

[Scott Mann]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way because I know he is pressed for time. My issue is not with the local community, but with the planning inspector. May I, in the very strongest terms, ask the Minister to put a rocket up the planning inspectors in order to support local democracy? When neighbourhood plans are voted through in a referendum, they should be respected.

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I can assure him that I have very recently written to the chief executive of the Planning Inspectorate, and I know that that letter is very clearly in the front of the mind, on the database and under the nose of all planning inspectors, so they are clear that we believe neighbourhood plans should be respected. The amendment (a) that we have tabled will take that even further, but I will continue to work with colleagues to look at how we can go further to ensure that neighbourhood plans get the robust support and programme that they need in the period ahead.