Housing and Planning Bill

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

It usually takes a parliamentarian years to become out of touch, but the hon. Gentleman has done it in six months. Shelter says that for someone to be able to afford a £450,000 starter home, they will have to earn an annual salary of £77,000 and have a deposit of £98,000. Let us put aside for the moment the nurse, the junior doctor and the bus driver—people who get a starter job in a top FTSE 100 company in the City of London will not be able afford one of the Government’s starter homes. That is how out of touch the Conservative mayoral candidate and the Government are.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a good case. I understand entirely why he is focusing on London, but we must not allow the Government to pretend that London is a specific and solitary special case. There are many parts of the country, particularly the Lake district, the Yorkshire dales and many rural parts of the United Kingdom, where house prices are incredibly expensive, wages are low and the availability of social rented housing is essential to the social mix of those communities. Does he agree that that is not just a problem in London?

[Sadiq Khan]

I agree completely with the hon. Gentleman, but I would go a step further. I do not think that the Government are making a special case for London; I think that the combined effect of the Chancellor’s autumn statement and this Bill shows that the Government have it in for London.

As I have said, I visited Camden today, where the average cost of a property to rent is 73% of the average income there. So much for the Conservative mayoral candidate being in touch with Londoners. We also discovered last week that the Government are watering down the definition of what is affordable to include starter homes that cost 17 times the average British salary. By comparison, my amendment 89 would guarantee a new home for social rent to replace one that has been sold.

In short, amendment 112 is, to quote once more the hon. Member for Richmond Park, “elastic and misleading”. My amendment is clear and firm. It meets the tests that Londoners expect and I urge Members, especially anyone who claims to understand the housing crisis in London and who wants to help fix it, to ignore the overblown claims about amendment 112 and instead support my amendment 89.

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[Tim Farron]

Given the time pressures, I shall limit my remarks to my amendment 109. I have made it clear that right to buy is, quite simply, the wrong spending priority at a time of great housing need when resources should be focused on building new homes. In my view, it is also being used as a means to reduce social and affordable housing at the very time that such homes are most desperately needed, particularly for the 1.6 million people currently rotting on a social housing waiting list who are often struggling to bring up children in temporary and inadequate accommodation.

Paying for the extension of right to buy through selling off high-value council housing is simply absurd and will have a crippling financial effect, taking away resources that are much needed by councils to build homes in their areas. The fact that no definition of “high value” is given in the Bill provides far too much wriggle room, with no guarantee of replacement—with the exception of amendment 112, which relates only to London. It has been discussed at length, so I shall not go into any further detail. I see no good reason, other than a political one, for not extending the deal to all regions and not just to London. London is so often the focus of attention when it comes to housing, but the housing crisis is just as real in many other places, especially in rural parts of Britain, including the west country, Cumbria, Northumberland and North Yorkshire.

The extension of right to buy, furthermore, is not genuinely a voluntary option for housing associations, as the Government have attempted to claim. The only voluntary aspect was the vote taken by members of the National Housing Federation last September, in which 45% of associations either voted against or abstained, masking the fact that many felt that the extension was already a done deal. The choice on the table was essentially between the immediate death of social housing or a slightly more drawn-out affair.

To cast this assault on social housing, and especially the assault on rural communities, as something willed by the housing associations is just bogus. The Bill puts many small and specialist housing associations, particularly those in rural areas such as mine, in an extremely difficult position. Some are worried about the impact it will have on maintaining additional services to residents—jobseeking advice, for example, which is often crucial to getting people back on their feet. I would therefore like to see the right to buy extension taken out of the Bill altogether. If the extension is to go ahead, however, a commitment to replacing the property sold off must be included. That is what would be achieved by my amendment 109.

Let me make it clear that I am not opposed to right to buy in principle. I am a supporter of the aspiration of those who wish to own their own home, and I want us to support housing associations as they seek to build mixed developments to give people the opportunity to get on to the housing ladder.

There are two possible reasons for extending right to buy. The first is to encourage aspiration and the second is to decimate and get rid of social housing. If it is the first that people care about most, legislating to extend right to buy would be focused on ensuring replacement, in which case my amendment 109 should be supported. This would provide people with the opportunity to buy their own home without at the same time depleting affordable housing stock for other families in need.

If the motivation were simply to reduce social housing—those motives are too depressing at this time even to bother discussing—the policy would be exactly what the Government are doing: right to buy would be extended and housing associations would be press-ganged to go along with it, with verbal expressions of intentions to replace homes. That would also mean ensuring zero guarantee in the legislation that any replacement must happen.

Sadly, it is clear that this Government’s reasons for press-ganging housing associations to extend right to buy are based on a pretty grubby desire to get rid of social housing. We know what happens when intentions to replace homes are expressed, but not enforced, in legislation. We have had many decades of experience of that. We know that one-to-one replacement simply does not happen. Even in recent years, since the one-to-one replacement policy was introduced in 2012, only one in every nine homes sold has been replaced.

My amendment 109 is designed to overcome that problem and guarantee the replacement of homes by insisting that before a home is sold off under right to buy, a replacement home must first be identified. This could be a home within a new planned development or an existing home that is acquired by the housing association with the proceeds of the sale. Housing associations should be required to identify that replacement property and communicate the plan to the regulator before selling the home.

[Andy Slaughter]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Tim Farron]

Probably not, because there is not much time left and I do not want to prevent others from speaking.

In addition, the replacement home should in most cases be equivalent to the one sold off. It should be located in the same local authority area and there must be an initial presumption that the replacement home would be the same tenure unless there is a strong case for changing it, based on local need. This would avoid the squeezing out of social homes for rent, which are often occupied by some of the most vulnerable people in our communities, in favour of other potentially more profitable tenures. My amendment would provide not only a one-for-one replacement of homes, but in many cases like for like. I urge Members to support it.

[Brandon Lewis]

I support the amendments tabled in the name of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. I want to say from the outset that I am proud to support amendments 112 and 130. I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) and for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), as well as to colleagues across London not just for inspiring these amendments, but for working so passionately and diligently to ensure that we get a good result for London. That is quite a contrast to Labour, from whose Members I have received no direct approaches about doing anything positive to increase the housing supply in London.

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[Brandon Lewis]

I will not give way at this stage, because we are short of time and I want to respond to the points that have been raised by those who have spoken.

The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale spoke about amendments 107 and 108. I trust that the housing association tenants in his constituency who want to buy their own homes will note his comments, and will remember them when they are home owners at the next general election.

[Tim Farron]

Is the Minister aware that in the 1980s the late Willie Whitelaw expressed concern to the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, about the impact of the right to buy, unmitigated, in rural communities such as the Lake district? Thirty years on, will he at least take note of what was said by the great man?

[Brandon Lewis]

I appreciate that one of the problems of the right to buy is that for 13 years, for every 170 homes that were sold the Labour Administration built only one, which is disgraceful. That is why, under our reintegrated scheme, there is one-for-one replacement. I think it right to move to two-for-one in London, given the higher-value asset sales there. The Labour party neglected to replace supply for 13 years, but Labour Members still think that the public will believe their rhetoric.

Let me return to chapter 4, part 4. Government new clause 59 and amendments 119, 120 and 128 will ensure that tenants who do not provide information on income cannot then have their rent raised any higher than the maximum chargeable under the policy as a whole. Government new clauses 60 and 61 and amendment 111, 113 to 118, 121 to 127 and 129 are part of our wider deregulatory package for housing associations. Amendment 111 removes clause 64, which is no longer needed.

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[Tim Farron]

It is right that the Government included a Housing Bill in the Queen’s Speech. Poor housing robs people of their freedom and liberty, and housing is the entry point to a civilised society. It is therefore a tragedy that in response to a broken market and chronic lack of supply, where we need 300,000 new builds a year over 10 years, where 1.6 million people are rotting on a council house waiting list, and where more than a quarter of 18 to 30-year-olds in this country are still living in the family home—

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

rose—

[Tim Farron]

I probably should not give way to be fair to other Members who wish to speak.

It is a tragedy that the scale of this crisis is inverse to this Government’s puny ambition. Where is the designation of the five to 10 garden cities that are needed over this decade? Where is the increase in income and building capacity for housing associations? Instead, there is a decrease in their ability to raise funds to develop homes. Where is the increase in social housing that we desperately need to meet the needs of 1.6 million people? Instead there is a diversion of funds towards the wrong priorities. In short, we have 200,000 so-called starter homes, instead of 300,000 section 106 actual affordable homes. Right to buy is the second huge assault on affordable housing.

If we believe that aspiration is right and that the right to own one’s home is good and something to work towards, we should be allowing a like-for-like replacement in advance. If, by an act of vandalism, we want to destroy social housing, we should do what the Government are doing.

The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) took offence at those on the Labour Front Bench who used the word “extreme”, but this Government’s actions towards rural communities are absolutely extreme. If we consider that three in four council houses in South Lakeland are now privately owned, and many are expensive private lets, we realise the damage done to rural Britain, not just in the lakes but in the west country and other parts of the UK. That shows a complete lack of understanding of rural Britain, as well as a failure to tackle the second homes crisis in those areas.

The Government acknowledged a broken market and made a choice to keep it broken. It is often said that there is nothing more stressful than the time we move home, because it is costly and psychologically difficult. Well, welcome to real Britain everyday life for millions of people who cannot afford their own home. The Government have looked those people in the eye. To govern is to choose, and they have chosen to let those people down. This Bill should fall.