Affordable Housing (Devon and Cornwall)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2022 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie, and I offer massive congratulations to the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on securing a really important debate. I apologise to colleagues, but I am a Member of Parliament for a western county—[Laughter.]

More seriously, I think we need to hunt as a pack because the issues that affect Devon and Cornwall affect Northumberland, North Yorkshire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Cumbria, Shropshire and other places as well. The hon. Member for North Devon was right to say that we should be sparing in our use of the word “crisis”, but she was right to use it in this case, because there is no doubt that rural communities like ours are under huge pressure. They were before the pandemic, but the pandemic has turbocharged a problem that already existed.

I want to echo something that the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) said earlier. The word “affordable” has become almost meaningless in how it is applied. In Devon, Cornwall or Cumbria, a house for sale at £200,000 is not affordable. The reality is that when average household incomes are in the £20,000s and average house prices are at least £250,000, that is a broken system and a broken market. I believe in a free market but I would intervene and referee to try to make it fairer. We are all trying to encourage the Government to take that seriously.

We represent desirable and beautiful places, with great, welcoming communities. We must get the tone spot-on, as we are not saying to people who visit or make their homes in our communities, or even have second homes in our communities, that they are not welcome. We are welcoming, British people—that is what we are. Our communities and economies thrive because of the tourism that underpins them, but we cannot ignore the fact that excessive second home ownership and holiday lets, excessive house prices in general, and a lack of availability of affordable homes for families who are either local or want to become local, are serious problems. We have a broken market, and we have to intervene to fix that.

The impact of excessive second home ownership is the death of communities. When a village or a town lacks the number of permanent residents needed to allow it to support a school, a pub, a post office or a bus route, its community becomes sad and dies as it no longer has any functional existence. No one wants to come on holiday to a dead community. We want to protect those communities so that they are alive and living.

I talked about the pandemic turbocharging an existing problem, but during the pandemic estate agents in my patch reported that anything between 50% and 80% of all house sales in the lakes were in the second home sector, showing a steady attrition of the already reducing permanent housing stock.

Holiday lets are vital and underpin any tourism economy, but if there are too many, where do they come from? In one year during the pandemic, there was a 32% rise in the number of holiday lets in my district council area. They are not being magicked from nowhere, but, as the hon. Member for North Devon rightly pointed out, arise from long-term lets where the landlord has ejected tenants using a section 21 eviction, and they then typically end up on Airbnb and similar places.

In my area, and I imagine Devon and Cornwall are very similar, we have high levels of employment and low levels of unemployment. Typically, we see couples, both of whom have jobs, with children at local schools, having to leave those jobs and take the children out of their schools in order to move to somewhere urban that is just about affordable, perhaps 50 miles away. That kills local communities, is tragic for the individuals and families concerned, and is a massive blow to the life of that community.

That point is worth bearing in mind when we look at new-build homes, wherever we live. There is a danger that we have got into the mindset that fewer planning regulations are better for creating more homes; that is not true. Planning authorities, whether they be national parks or local authorities, have to have the power to direct what kind of homes are built, in order to make them more likely to happen. In this country, we are constantly building to meet demand, but not building to meet need, which is what creates opposition to new development.

In most communities like mine, the people are the opposite of nimbys. They are desperate for new homes, but for homes that people need. Of course, a nice new-build four or five-bedroom property in Cornwall, Devon or Cumbria will sell and someone will buy it, but it is not what that community needs. We need planning laws that make sure that the homes that are built are green, sustainable, affordable and underpin the local community and economy.

[Anthony Mangnall]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise what the Secretary of State is trying to do through his BIDEN acronym, which means build beautifully, make sure there is infrastructure, hold developers to account, take into account the environment and make sure neighbourhood plans are fully weighted?

[Tim Farron]

Yes. That is massively important, because if a community supports a development, it is more likely to happen. I regret that we do not enforce zero carbon homes and that we still permit the inflation of the value of land through the massively outdated and hugely damaging Land Compensation Act 1961, which inflates the price of houses. Those issues could be tackled by giving local authorities and communities more power, and if better, more beautiful and greener houses are built.

[Anthony Mangnall]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, with which I wholeheartedly agree. When a planning Bill is introduced, will he support the measures set out in the Planning (Enforcement) Bill, the ten-minute rule Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) a few months ago? Those measures were specifically designed to ensure that plans presented to a community or a local council are not altered when the site is developed, driving down the affordability, greenness or environmentally friendly nature of the original proposal.

[Tim Farron]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, and risks my going off on one about viability assessments and so on, and the fact that when conditions are made, they should be applied. We need the Government to back national parks and local authorities, who impose conditions, get through the planning game and put affordability in there, and then developers say, “We have found some rocks in the field. It will cost too much money to do that now.” We need to ensure that communities get what they were promised and not otherwise. He makes an excellent point.

I will be quick in my final remarks. The impact on communities is huge and the impact on the economy is massive. We had a vote the other night on the amendment on health and social care workforces. In communities such as ours, as has been mentioned by right hon. and hon. Members, we have a serious problem. On the whole, these are older communities. My community is about 10 years above the national average age. That means smaller working-age populations. If those people are squeezed out even further, there is no one to run the health service. People will take jobs in the local hospital or care home, check the housing market and then give back word. That happens all the time, as has already been mentioned.

Cumbria Tourism carried out a survey of members a few months ago and discovered that last year 63% of Lake District hospitality businesses worked below capacity, despite demand being there. Why was that? Because they did not have the staff to meet that demand. That is in part due to the issues that we have raised today. What can we do? Change planning law to make first homes, second homes and holiday lets separate categories of planning use, so that planning authorities and councils can enforce affordability and availability, and ensure there is a limit on the number of second homes and holiday lets in a community. We could allow, as the Welsh Senedd has decided, local authorities to increase council tax above 100% on second homes. Councils would have the choice to do that; they would not have to. As the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) mentioned, quite rightly, we should ensure that council tax is paid on every property that is built as a residence.

The simple fact is that a wealthy person, with a second home on the Lizard peninsula or in the Lake District, is subsidised by somebody on the breadline and going to the food bank in the same community because they have let their second home for 70 days a year. That means they pay no council tax and, as a small business, pay no business rate. That is an outrage from the Exchequer’s point of view. It is also morally outrageous, that people barely getting by are subsidising wealthy people who can afford two, three, four or more homes.

We also need to ensure that section 21 evictions are abolished, as the Government promised in their manifesto. We need to decide the point at which a second home has become a holiday let, and raise the bar from 70 nights to more than 100 nights. It could be made consistent with the HMRC requirement of 105 nights a year to qualify as a holiday let.

My final point is this. I agree with pretty much everything everyone has said in the debate so far. We have been raising the matter for years. I remember raising it with the junior planning Minister a few years ago, a gentleman who is now Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am concerned that we make these points, which are obviously an issue, showing the need to tackle the lack of affordable housing in rural communities, yet the Government still refuse to take the action needed to deliver for those communities.

I hope that in a spirit of solidarity and hunting as a pack, we might persuade the Minister to listen and take the action that rural communities need.