Greater London Authority Bill

No, I was not aware of that. However, I am aware that Westminster City Council is very good at presenting its case, and I hope that that is not a synthetic request to the noble Lord, Lord Best. I hope that if he comes up with some fairly radical recommendations, they will be followed up by Westminster City Council. A young person in Westminster cannot afford to acquire a property unless they rent. If they rent, they get what is little more than a slum for £200 a week—that will be a studio flat. They might get a little more than a slum for £300 a week, with one bedroom. I know young people in London; lots of my son’s friends live here and they tell me about what is going on in the housing market. I have seen some places where living conditions are appalling. The reason rents are high is, first, the sale of housing association property—not helped, perhaps I may say, by our own Government rules that force housing associations to sell some of their housing stock—and, secondly, the fact that people simply cannot manage in the present circumstances. In London, local authorities simply do not have the stock and are not in a position to help. Thankfully, following the Prescott initiative that introduced measures to make it more difficult for tenants to buy their properties in London, we have managed to retain a greater number of properties within the public sector. However, until those changes in the discount regime were introduced only a year or two ago, we were still selling properties in London and denuding that part of the market that was available to people for reasonable rents. I desperately want to see more comparatively low-rent property made available within the public sector in London. That simply cannot happen in Westminster, given the way we are going. It is impossible for young people to buy in London. A one-bedroom former council flat in Westminster will cost you £250,000, which will require a mortgage of around £1,550 to £1,600 a month—nearly £20,000 a year. If you want to buy a property in an owner-occupied estate, you could add 50 per cent to that. It is utterly impossible for people to purchase, out of post-tax income, a property in the Westminster area. The cost of property in Westminster is reflected right across central London. The only way around that is for someone to grab this issue, run with it and require local authorities to build, and require far more social housing in private housing planning applications. Section 106 agreements do not work as they should and there should be far more enforcement of them. I have not looked at all the amendments tabled, but the Section 106 document in relation to Bowater House demonstrated a lack of proper enforcement powers to ensure that the developer fulfilled the requirements to provide social housing within the time specified in the agreement. The agreement was sloppily drawn up and we need a completely new regime to deal with this issue in London. I do not, frankly, give a damn who the Mayor is, so long as they take on that responsibility. I understand that we modified our original proposals. Perhaps I may say to the Government that I would have given the Mayor far more substantial powers to deal with this issue because, to put it bluntly, I do not trust the boroughs that I know.