Localism Bill

My Lords, I thank the Minister for giving the amendment her careful consideration, and I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, my noble friends Lord Beecham, Lord Kennedy and Lady Wall, and to some extent the noble Lord, Lord Newton, for speaking in support of it. The Minister has reiterated her previous position that this amendment is not necessary and I think I interpret that as her saying that not only are there objections to the wording of this particular proposed new clause in terms of a 10-year rolling strategy and other things but that she could envisage no strategic clause that would be helpful to the position. If that is the case, I have to part company with her. The noble Baroness was right to say in opening that there is a long-term trend and that it will certainly take a long-term programme to reverse it. However, things have got significantly worse in the past few years with the decline in new build as well as in the mortgage market. As the noble Lord, Lord Newton, said, for the past 30 or more years we have assumed that the housing situation was going to be improved, at least in the long term, by the increase in home ownership. That has seen a very sharp reversal. We see from a report published only last week by the National Housing Federation that home ownership has already fallen from over 70 per cent to 63 per cent, and it envisages that it will shortly be below 60 per cent. That is an entirely new situation confronting the Government, developers and local authorities, so there is a sharper situation than the one envisaged by the provisions of the earlier legislation. I also think that this Bill as a whole places more responsibility on local authorities than was the case when those pieces of legislation were brought forward. Personally, I am in favour of putting more responsibility on local authorities in this regard, and in that sense I depart from some of the measures taken by the previous Government and the one before that. However, in the situation that we face, local authorities are both legislatively and in reality going to have to take more responsibility, and therefore they need a strategic framework. Furthermore, the key point which the noble Baroness missed is that the third line of the amendment makes it clear that we cannot consider the social housing strategy set out in subsequent clauses of this Bill, which we shall come to debate, unless it is set against an overall strategy. That, in a sense, is the main reason for putting this in at this point in the Bill, otherwise we move straight to social housing, with all the problems of waiting lists, which we know councils face, and all the problems that have been identified in relation to the provision and allocation of social housing without referring to a wider framework. That would be wrong. There are legitimate questions about whether a 10-year strategy is the right one. We need some sense of perspective for planning and development purposes, but we must also recognise that we have to adapt to changing circumstances. A rolling programme allows you to do that. If the noble Baroness wishes me to change the reference to 10 years, I will do so, but we need some sort of rolling programme. If we do not have it, the social housing propositions in the Bill will be seen—I hate to put it in these terms in one sense—as an attack on past social housing practice and a problem for future social housing rather than as a contribution towards solving the overall housing crisis. I therefore think that this issue is sufficiently important for me to test the opinion of the House on the amendment. Division on Amendment 1 Contents 164; Not-Contents 197. Amendment 1 disagreed.