Housing and Regeneration Bill

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, for moving the amendment, but I am sure he will not be surprised when I argue that it is unnecessary. I say that for good reasons, and I shall go through them. However, the noble Lord was right when he reflected at the outset on the task of facing a new chief executive and the many ambitions that have to be satisfied. I have made a list of the topics that have been covered by our debates today on which noble Lords have expressed their aspirations. We have not yet gone through them all and we are unlikely to do so, but they range from the promotion of rural housing, securing an anti-poverty impact, ensuring that the concerns of the disabled are properly taken into account, the encouragement of community building, through to the intelligent use of social stock for those coming out of care. Those are just a few on the list. Within that context, I well understand why the noble Lord has put forward an amendment to promote social homebuy. He and others have argued that more needs to be done to promote home ownership. My noble friend Lord Graham of Edmonton made a trenchant plea for a more reflective attitude towards the sale of council houses, and I certainly understand why he might make that argument. Perhaps in some respects we have now begun to inherit the problems that became evident at the more enthusiastic end of the home ownership push using the sale of council houses. As a consequence, the system is now much more refined, and rightly so. However, we would argue that we need to take a balanced approach and to bring into home ownership people who have genuine and quite proper aspirations to that end, which I am sure we can all share. We need to consider how to address the problems inherent in the take-up of social home buying. It makes no sense to single out one form of tenure for particular priority. Indeed, my noble friend Lady Ford made the point that we need flexibility. She is absolutely right, and my noble friend Lady Dean, in the light of all her experience with the Housing Corporation, underlined that. But my noble friend also made the point that surveys have shown that people see home ownership as ensuring that they have a secure stake, not just in their own homes, but in their local communities. That is a valuable aspiration in terms of community building that we would be foolish to ignore. The effect of the amendment would essentially be to elevate the status of social homebuy above other schemes for delivering home ownership. That would divert the focus of the Homes and Communities Agency away from its other objects—in particular its object to improve the supply quality of housing, which has been mentioned in this afternoon’s debate. We as a Government have set challenging targets for the agency and we will expect it to deliver those. My noble friend Lady Andrews has said that the expectation is that the Homes and Communities Agency will deliver 70,000 more affordable homes by 2010-11 and 3 million new homes by 2020; but it would be wrong of the Government to hamper the HCA’s ability to deliver those targets by making it focus on one form of home ownership. We need a wide range of options for home ownership. Owning one’s home is an aspiration for many people. All too often, for many, that never becomes a reality, despite their best efforts to work hard and save money for a deposit. We have heard of the many key workers living in our capital—nurses, teachers, emergency service personnel and postal workers, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said—who struggle to get their own homes and that can cause disconjunctions in the labour market. We have to respond to that by helping people get onto the housing ladder in different ways. We want to offer as many people as possible the opportunity to own their homes and to build a stake in the community. For that reason, we aim to provide 25,000 shared-ownership and shared-equity homes a year, funded mainly through the Housing Corporation and the successor body, from 2008-09. We need to be careful about being overly prescriptive as to where those homes are located. The amendment takes us dangerously near to having a fixed percentage in each area; that would be wrong and would constrain innovation. We seek to build on innovative financing to help more people into partial ownership on a shared-equity basis. As noble Lords will have noticed, the Chancellor announced in the Budget that from April this year, two new equity loans will be available through the Government’s shared-equity scheme. In December last year, we announced that social homebuy would continue as a voluntary scheme after the pilot period. That is aimed at increasing opportunities for social housing tenants to access home ownership. We are encouraging landlords to improve affordability and are allowing them flexibility to set low rents and share maintenance. In that context, the HCA must ensure that housing of all tenures and types is appropriate to meet the needs of the community it is provided for. The HCA will have the incentive and expertise to do that. For those reasons, we cannot agree to the amendment, although its aspiration to deliver more shared-ownership and shared-equity homes through social homebuy and other equity-type products is common across the Benches in your Lordships’ House.