Housing and Regeneration Bill

moved Amendment No. 24: 24: Clause 2, page 2, line 3, after ““needs”” insert ““and aspirations”” The noble Lord said: I was tempted not to move this amendment in the interests of progress, but my noble friend suggested that that was a lost cause, at least today. There is an important issue here and it would be interesting to hear the Government’s response. There is a question of who determines and decides needs between the sectors. There are the aspirations of occupiers, which I will talk about in a minute, but also the aspirations of owners. Then there are the aspirations of public sector owners, whether that is councils owning properties or arm’s length or social ownership through registered social landlords, and so on. It is right that the decent homes programme has set out to bring all socially owned property up to a proper standard. That is right. It would be wrong if the public sector in its widest sense, including all social landlords, were to tolerate conditions that were not up to modern standards and to allow houses to fall back from modern standards because things like central heating had not been replaced and renovated. Nevertheless, that skews priorities in terms of occupiers, because it puts the resources into housing that is occupied by people who already have a reasonable standard of housing—not necessarily at the expense of people who often are living in the worst conditions, but it does not give them priority. That is in some of the private sector tenanted properties—that is, private landlords’ properties. In a sense, all the while in our discussions on the Bill, the elephant in the room—to use a modern phrase that is fairly unpleasant but one that people seem to understand—is the private tenanted sector. Some of that sector provides extremely high-quality housing such as luxury apartments, but in the areas in which English Partnerships has interested itself and in which the new agency will also interest itself—what one might call regeneration areas—the worst conditions are very often in the low-quality private rented sector. If we are talking about needs and aspirations, there is a huge great hole in the Bill. We will find ways of talking about the private rented sector later on, so I shall not talk about it in great detail now, but it must be put on the record. There is no doubt that the Decent Homes programme is to be welcomed and is being welcomed hugely whenever the investment is made. Houses that were built as council houses were built to the high standards of the day, and had more space than any social housing that is built nowadays. My daughter lives in a ground-floor former council flat in Fulham. That is a disgrace really; she is a young, athletic lass and lives in a house that was designed for old people—but there we are. She rents it from a private landlord. Everyone who visits her says, ““Look at this kitchen. It’s a wonderful great eat-in kitchen. Look at the size of these bedrooms””. She has learnt from me to say, ““Ah, Parker Morris standards””. I am not sure whether she understands what they are, but it is true. When people decry council housing—quite wrongly in my view—they should remember that those houses were built to the high standards of their time. They did not, however, have modern heating systems or modern insulation, and the doors, windows, roofs, chimney stacks and outside rendering needed to be replaced in time. A massive programme of investment was therefore needed to replace the heating systems, to re-render, to re-roof and to do whatever else was needed—new doors, new windows. Am I talking about the Decent Homes programme? No, I am not; I am talking about the massive programme to refurbish council housing that took place in this country from the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. It was a huge and hugely successful programme. Thirty years later, the Decent Homes programme is bringing the houses that were brought up to scratch then up to scratch now. In some cases, the standards are better; the insulation is better and the heating system is more efficient. In some cases, it is simply a replacement programme, because every so often you have to replace. One of the problems in the public sector is that the replacement programme tends to take place through great splurges of investment rather than more organically over the years. Nevertheless, Decent Homes is the second huge programme of investment in the council houses that were built in this country before the war and in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s. We should recognise that. This programme is not new; it is simply the second phase. In many ways, the tenants in those houses quite rightly aspire to live in modern conditions—the same conditions in which their neighbours who bought their council houses live or in which the people across the street live who are in owner-occupied properties. It is also the aspiration of the public sector landlords and social landlords to be owners of top-quality properties, so tenants are not the only ones who have aspirations. What do tenants want? They often want better housing, better locations and better types of occupation. Lodgers might want to become tenants and private sector tenants might want to become housing association tenants. They might want to buy their properties or to move into other properties and become owner-occupiers. This is a natural process. When people talk about housing needs, it is not just a simple matter of looking at how many homeless people there are or how many young couples cannot find a decent property. It is a much more complex process of evolution throughout the housing market as broadly defined. At the very heart of all this is the private sector. In areas where housing conditions are difficult, the private landlord sector is at the heart of the problem. Not long ago we discussed a previous housing Bill which introduced a series of measures ranging from empty dwelling management orders to selective licensing to enable local authorities to tackle some of the more problematic landlord-owned properties. Looking at it from the perspective of an area in Lancashire that has many such problems associated with private sector landlords, I can say that so far that legislation has done nothing at all for us. It has been a flop. This is not the Bill to put it right, but if the Government and the new Homes and Communities Agency are going to take a new look at these regeneration areas—no doubt the HCA will because it is a new body taking over responsibilities from a number of others—the private sector really has to be looked at again. The current legislation may be okay and it may just need more push and more impetus and less blockage from above when councils want to do something, or it may be defective and we may need more legislation—God help us—but this matter will not go away; it is the elephant in the room. I beg to move.