Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Tim Farron and Seema Kennedy

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Commons Chamber

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

The Bill comes at the right time—in the midst of a national housing crisis—but unfortunately it does not provide the right solution. It is clear that Britain needs more affordable homes, both to rent and buy, and a huge increase in the supply of homes. Yet the Bill gives billions of pounds to a relatively small number of people through the extension of right to buy while prioritising a relatively small number of better-off renters through so-called starter homes, rather than supporting the much larger number of people for whom saving for a deposit, even for a starter home, seems like a pipe dream.

The purpose of my amendment 110 is to ensure that new homes built under the starter homes initiative are genuinely affordable and include social rented homes. Unamended, this Bill threatens an even worse crisis for those in need of an affordable home to rent or buy in the years to come.

As it stands, the starter homes initiative will merely allow a few people to access those homes at the cost of losing about 300,000 new genuinely affordable homes that would have been secured through planning gain. The policy is bad and based on the wrong priorities. In addition, the sale of social rented homes will further exacerbate the situation. It is expensive. The National Housing Federation estimates the cost at £11.6 billion. It is unfair for private renters, who have been paying market rents for many years and do not have the luxury of a £100,000 discount on buying a home. Given the Bill’s current lack of safeguards for replacements and the funding mechanism through the sale of council homes, the policy will lead to a reduction in affordable homes. I would like the provision to be removed from the Bill when we discuss the matter later.

On amendment 110, we should ensure that new starter homes are genuinely affordable and meet the needs of the community in which they are built. They should be mixed-tenure, including shared ownership and social rented homes. In rural communities such as mine in south Cumbria, we should ensure that there are planning controls for newly built properties to prevent them from slipping into the second-home market, undermining the sustainability of our communities and pushing up house prices for local people.

The Government must recognise the differential impact of their proposals across the country. In places such as London, the west country, Northumberland and Cumbria, the forced selling off of high-value council homes will reduce the supply of affordable homes in the very places where they are needed most: where high rental prices push out those who work locally on low incomes, often causing them to travel long distances with unaffordably high travel costs to reach work or forcing them to give up work altogether. It is absolutely the wrong thing to do and puts a crippling financial burden on councils already struggling to cope with reduced budgets.

My amendment relates to the Bill’s impact on the supply of affordable homes through the inaccurately titled starter homes proposal—in particular, the fact that the starter homes will replace a larger number of other forms of affordable homes to rent and buy, including shared ownership, resulting again in a squeezing of the availability of homes for lower-income renters. A policy similar to the starter homes proposal would be deserving of support as long as those homes were kept below market value in perpetuity, which is essential so that the benefits of starter homes are passed on to future buyers. However, they should be in addition to, not instead of, other forms of affordable homes that meet different needs. Consequently, councils should have a duty to promote all forms of affordable tenures in new developments and not exclusively the Government’s narrow, mostly unaffordable definition of a starter home.

[Seema Kennedy (South Ribble) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman talks about the affordability of starter homes, and I refer to a development in my constituency, in Penwortham—a place that he knows very well, because it is where he grew up. Much of this debate has been London-centric. In the vast majority of the country, starter homes are affordable to working people, and that is why this initiative is very popular with all our constituents.

[Tim Farron]

I am particularly grateful to have given way to my dad’s MP. On affordability, we all started somewhere. We might be fortunate enough to be homeowners, but people who are only just a bit younger than me belong to a generation where the average earner cannot afford to buy a home of any kind, so a starter home is a great blessing wherever it may be. I am not arguing against starter homes, but against a narrow definition whereby they are built at the cost of a larger number of genuinely affordable homes across the country. That is what my amendment seeks to address.