Housing and Regeneration Bill

I was evacuated during the war but, if I am allowed to count my grandmother staying on in London during the Blitz, 2007 was the first year in my life in which I did not have a London address. Therefore, I have to declare an immediate interest in that I no longer have a London address and I am now a totally rural person. That in some way affects my attitudes towards this debate. The pressures on affordable housing in rural areas have already been alluded to. To provide examples, I will simply take two cases from the parish of 200 in which we live. First, I have quoted the example of my former immediate neighbour, a retired disabled agricultural labourer, on two previous occasions in your Lordships’ House, and this will be the third. He has now gone into sheltered housing. A breeze-block bungalow with a simple roof, in which he lived for really all his life, was put on the market in part because of brownfield site opportunities. The 0.22 acre site was sold for £300,000, the intention being to knock the bungalow down and to put on that site a house that will have four bedrooms, each with en suite bathrooms. We made no complaint to the planning authorities, but it is yet another unit of affordable housing that has been taken away. In the same way, the son of one of our colleagues in your Lordships’ House, totally honourably—I have no complaint whatever about the process—bought two semi-detached cottages that were attached to each other. Those represented two separate pieces of affordable housing in a single parish are now going to be a single house with further extension. Because of the duties that attach—I am not making any fiscal complaint—to the purchase of houses nowadays, there are any number of cases in the countryside where people are buying houses with the specific intention of extending them. They are not buying them because the house itself will fit their needs, but they will add extensions to them. I immediately declare a vicarious mea culpa, since our own house was sold to us by an estate agent under the slogan, ““A 17th century shepherd’s cottage interestingly extended””. It did at least win a Civic Trust Award and is not therefore subject to the next complaint, about which I have an incidental question for the Minister. I go back to the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, at the start of this Committee stage. We are seeing in the countryside a whole series of houses that are being given extensions that have only a nodding acquaintance with the architecture of the original building. The Minister does not need to answer now, but do the planning authorities have any design responsibility to see that there is not a discrepancy between the extension and the original building? At the moment, we are running the risk of acquiring the sort of landscape that they have in Ireland as a result of somewhat relaxed planning laws. I will revert briefly to the urban experience, to follow up on what the noble Lord, Lord Best, said. In 1987, the Peabody Trust, which was a massive landlord in my former constituency, decided that it was not going to provide any priority to fourth-generation families living in a particular community. The Peabody Trust had estates all over the constituency. It was only going to be decided on economic criteria. I said that I thought it ran the risk of destroying communities that had existed for a very long time, whose strength was their very durability and continuity. I am pleased to say, to the credit of the Peabody Trust, that after 10 years it acknowledged that I had been right, and it established a reasonable quota for people whose families had lived in the area for a long time. In rural areas, we do not have landlords with that degree of control. Therefore, the same instrument cannot be used to provide continuity in affordable housing in the countryside. I recall a meeting of the All-Party Group on Homelessness and Housing Need, which a number of your Lordships have attended. It was addressed by the director of the Rural Housing Trust, who said that the problem with dealing with one-off schemes in small communities was that the costs were disproportionately high and that they were therefore at a disadvantage. I end on a different personal note. The late Derek Smith, who was a school contemporary of mine, retired from being a farmer and set up ViRSA, which dealt with rural shops. Before his premature death from cancer, he had become involved in housing as well. I cannot say how strongly I support the thrust and theme of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Best. When I became a Member of Parliament, Soho, in my constituency, was threatened with massive demolition. It was saved by the creation of the Soho Housing Association in the area, which did a remarkable job of retaining any number of handsome—frequently 18th-century—buildings that would otherwise have been swept away. The rural housing scene requires a sympathetic and interested resource, however that is achieved, to provide support in the same way as the Soho Housing Association did when it was set up. I am very proud of what the association has been able to deliver, and I very much hope that, arising out of this legislation, we will see similar advances all over the country.