Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

My Lords, I speak from personal experience, although not specifically in relation to exception sites. We had the good fortune, if one could regard it as such, to get caught up in a major development. There was the usual negotiation over what I would regard as wholly proper gain for the community, as a result of this development. It was a very large development and part of the price was 200 social houses. We thought that was a perfectly acceptable price to pay. The way it works is that the gross value enhancement is diminished by the cost of those houses to the landowners, who were me and my brothers. We thought that was a reasonable price to pay. The problem was overcoming, in those days, the right to buy. We were quite prepared to give up the value and we accepted that the town should have this benefit. We were not prepared to do it, however, if the first people to move in could live there for three years and then have the complete capital enhancement as a result, because they had lived there for three years and therefore had the right to buy. That was a technical problem, writ somewhat smaller. This is precisely the same problem. As the noble Lord, Lord Carter, the noble Earl, Lord Peel, and my noble friend said, if the protection of this social ownership is removed, nobody will be prepared to put their sites into a scheme of this nature in order to provide social housing for their local communities, whatever their need may be. They will feel it is a gross abuse that somebody can move into that property and, after a relatively short period of time, inherit the gross value, which was infinitely greater than the sum for which they originally provided, which is in effect at a sacrificed price. This is a very significant matter and I do not know what the effect of this change will be. If it does happen to go wider than the specific case of exception sites, then it will bedevil the whole construction of social housing on a wider scale. It is common practice nowadays for social houses to be provided on quite a large scale as a large part of major developments. In effect, society gets those houses for nothing, because the landowner sacrifices the value in order to make it possible. Although landowners do have a desire to make a profit, they also happen to have a social conscience that goes with it. That is right and proper in view of social housing. Perhaps I may make a slightly acid comment. One of the weaknesses of the development gain/charge which the Government are considering is that it will make what is at present a free negotiation between a landowner and his local communities, as to the gain that the community should get, into something that will be bedevilled by a national charge and that will, heaven help us, go back to the Treasury and not to the local community who generated the development in the first place.