Housing and Regeneration Bill

My Lords, I too am pleased to welcome the Second Reading of the Housing and Regeneration Bill and to offer the strongest possible support to my noble friend the Minister as she guides us through this. Not content with turning in a virtuoso performance on the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill and the Greater London Authority Bill in the previous Session, she is now a glutton for punishment and will take us through the Housing and Regeneration Bill and no doubt the Planning Bill thereafter. I suspect that many of the same faces will appear in those debates, to which I look forward. Like many other noble Lords speaking today, I fundamentally believe that having a safe, secure and decent home to live in is a basic human right. More than that, I also believe that the kind of environment in which we grow up profoundly affects our self-esteem and plays an important part in determining our levels of aspiration. I got the regeneration bug when I was 17 years-old, not through any professional route but through watching my mother, who as a head teacher inherited a primary school in 1980 in an area where male unemployment was at 62 per cent. To say that the school was dilapidated was probably giving it the best of it. My mother understood then, as I understand now, that the surroundings in which you grow up have a huge effect on how you feel. She set about trying to do something about the state of that school. She went first to the local education authority. This was 1980, and she was given very short shrift when she asked whether she could have some funding to improve the school. Undaunted, she said, ““What have I got here? I have 60-odd per cent male unemployment. I have a lot of guys who know how to repair things—a lot of tradesmen who have time on their hands””. Over 18 months, my mother, together with the parents in that school, set about transforming it. She begged and borrowed—I would not go so far as to say that she stole—resources, but she came by quantities of paint in ways that we never questioned. We found fabric in all kinds of places, and in 18 months the whole atmosphere of the school and the whole physical quality of the environment in which the children were educated was completely transformed. Unsurprisingly, in three or four years, not only had the educational attainment risen considerably but my mother also had the distinction of being the manager of two footfalls teams who have carried off the Ayrshire county trophies at different levels. In my subsequent voluntary and professional careers in regeneration, I learnt very early that if you cannot get through a problem you had better figure out how to get around it. I declare an interest in that I work for the Royal Bank of Canada. I have responsibility for its social infrastructure and investment, as part of which I manage its social housing loan book. The Government’s determination to supply high-quality, well regulated social housing and to continue to encourage home ownership that is affordable, well designed and sustainable has been one of our proudest achievements in the past 10 years. However, we all know that more must be done, which is why I particularly welcome this new legislation, creating as it does the fundamental building blocks for accelerating the supply of new affordable and social housing. There are four important sections in the Bill and we are fortunate indeed to have many noble Lords with significant expertise in many aspects of the legislation that is now being proposed. Indeed, I have over many years had the pleasure of working with the noble Lord, Lord Best, who is currently not in his place, during his tenure at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and of joining arms with the noble Baroness, Lady Billingham, in her leadership of the regeneration in Corby. I pay tribute to the magnificent job that she did there. I have also worked alongside the noble Baroness, Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, during her tenure as chair of the Housing Corporation. I am happy to admit that the initial plotting that she and I engaged in brought the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships much closer together during that time and sowed the seeds for the creation of the new Homes and Communities Agency. I shall dwell on that aspect of the legislation today. Many other noble Lords can comment with far greater expertise than I can on the creation of the new regulator, although I will just say that it is absolutely vital that a close working relationship is developed and nurtured between the regulator and the new Homes and Communities Agency. Moreover, although we all understand that the rights of tenants are paramount, we must never forget that the regulator has a fundamental impact on the availability of private finance and its terms. The RSL sector has been exceptionally successful. Indeed, it has arguably been the most successful model of bringing private finance into public services. We should recall that since 1988 and the introduction of widespread private finance into the sector, more than £43 billion of private finance has been invested in social housing. The leadership and consistency shown by the Housing Corporation as a regulator has been the key determinant of that. The regulator’s ability to assure the governance and management of RSLs, and of course to step in when necessary to protect tenants and investment, has continued to result in exceptionally good financing terms for a long number of years. That has meant many new developments. It is essential that the relationship between the two new bodies is close and productive so that policy development, which continues to protect tenants, also continues to encourage a favourable financing regime. On the Homes and Communities Agency, I had the privilege of chairing English Partnerships for six years and, with the strong support of my right honourable friend John Prescott MP, helped that organisation to build significant capacity over that period by developing large-scale difficult sites such as the Greenwich Peninsula; by encouraging the significant re-use of brownfield land—more than 70 per cent of new homes are now built on brownfield land, although we still have significant supply; by brokering much more intelligently surplus government land such as former MoD sites—the Oakington Barracks in Cambridgeshire is an example; and by promoting and encouraging an urban renaissance in many of our towns and cities, such as Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester, and in our new towns, such as Milton Keynes, Harlow, Bracknell and Telford, to name but a few. Most importantly over those six years, English Partnerships began to work very closely with the Housing Corporation, informally bringing land, expertise and funding together to accelerate the pace and to improve the quality of housing right across England. However, in the past couple of years, it became increasingly clear that the job needed more than just informal co-operation. English Partnerships relied on legislation first created in 1948 and the Housing Corporation relied on legislation created in 1964. They had different statutory objectives. We found that we had different value-for-money regimes, different output measures and different reporting timescales, so trying to make sense of those different streams of investment became very difficult. It restrained creativity to the point of tension where it ceased to be creative. Even between us, we did not always have the powers to do the job properly. Noble Lords have questioned whether the powers are perhaps drawn too widely. Certainly, English Partnerships dearly would have liked the power to make community investments, because, frequently, bricks and mortar do only a piece of the job. But, being seen have funded some community enterprises and community groups, and to have done the people side of regeneration—which is as important, if not more important in many instances, as bricks and mortar—would have really made a difference. I quite take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, on the breadth of the powers, but it is important to give this new organisation the tools to do the job. When the then Secretary of State, the right honourable David Miliband MP, announced a review of housing and regeneration delivery in 2006, it had become clear to all of us for the reasons that I have stated that we needed a new, expert vehicle that was fit-for-purpose for the 21st century. That review and, more importantly, the subsequent consultation that followed—I saw more than 1,500 people during the regional consultations in the summer of 2007, which I recall because that face-to-face consultation across England took place during the period of the flooding—confirmed that, among key stakeholders, local authorities—particularly among the wide range of local authority leaders and senior officers I met—regional development agencies, private house builders and developers, and the RSLs, there was a clear appetite and strong support for the creation of a new agency that had the ability to bring together skills, expertise, and land and planning know-how in a one-stop shop as an expert national partner for local authorities and regional bodies. While I understand the reservations and the concerns being expressed on behalf of local government, from my experience in carrying out all those face-to-face meetings over the summer of 2008, although there were some concerns, they were tempered by a desire to have an expert partner who could sit alongside local, democratically-elected authorities to create the kind of places that we all wish to see. The legislation before us closely reflects that consultation process and is entirely faithful to the review process that preceded it, and I greatly welcome it. As the Minister has said, we are very fortunate to have a chief executive designate of the calibre of Sir Bob Kerslake. His long experience in local government and his excellent regeneration track record in Sheffield make him exceptionally well equipped to lead the process that he has called ““a single conservation”” with local government and others. Finally, we are in a period where the housing market and the banking market are severely dislocated. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, mentioned, the announcement last week by a major housebuilder, Persimmon, that all new construction is to be halted underlines how very vulnerable we are to the vagaries of the housing and the capital markets. So, if we need reminding, the current environment should underline why we need a strong delivery agency, which can, at whatever point in the economic cycle, intervene if the market fails. When I was at English Partnerships, from time to time, I was asked clearly by colleagues in the Treasury, ““Where is the market failure?””. I suspect that they are not asking that question today. In conclusion, the sooner we can enable the new agency and the new regulator to get going, the better. I urge all noble Lords, however we find ourselves in the debates in the coming weeks, strongly to support this legislation.