My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Best, got us off to a good start in our deliberations on Part 3 of the Bill. He touched
upon a fundamental issue facing the country—and, indeed, as other noble Lords said, all political parties at this time—which is the housing crisis. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Tope, will forgive me for quoting a few statistics in a little while, but this crisis is characterised by an acute housing shortage, with housebuilding falling to its lowest levels in peacetime since the 1920s, home ownership being unaffordable for many low to middle-income families, a falling programme of homes for social rent, an unaffordable “affordable rent” model and a burgeoning private rented sector in which rents are rising—all accompanied by insecurity and uncertainty in the marketplace.
The Government will claim that they have built some 445,000 houses since 2010, but this represents just over 110,000 a year—way short of what we need, the 243,000 figure quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Best. This is less than half of what the country needs. Figures from the House of Commons Library show that since 2010 the gap between housing supply and demand has increased by more than half a million homes, with London bearing the brunt of the increasing shortfall. It has been reported that DCLG Ministers have been advised of the prospect of the number of housing starts falling in 2014, with just 16,000 affordable home starts. Perhaps I can ask the Minister whether that is correct.
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However, I acknowledge that the gap is not a new phenomenon. Although the previous Labour Government built nearly 2 million more homes in England, including half a million affordable homes, between 1997 and 2010, more were needed. This is despite 2007-08 seeing the largest increase in net additional dwellings for 30 years. But that was far short of what we built in the 1950s and 1960s. I think it was Harold Macmillan, as Housing Minister, who reached 300,000. In Harold Wilson’s Government in the mid-1960s, something like 350,000 homes were built in a year, so we can do it.
The noble Lord, Lord Best, challenges us to say what we are going to do to address the crisis. He offers the specific proposition about using the infrastructure planning regime for larger developments. I find myself constrained from being as expansive as one would wish in this debate, given where we are on policy formation. In particular, we—the Labour Party—await the report of a housing commission set up by Ed Miliband and chaired by Sir Michael Lyons. Nevertheless, we are on the record as saying that we plan to increase the supply of new homes in England above 200,000 a year by the end of the next Parliament—not 300,000 by 2030.
Such plans include giving local authorities that want to expand the right to grow, with access to a fast-track planning process to resolve any disputes with neighbouring authorities that are blocking development, and support to accelerate the pace of development. I agree that the duty to co-operate is simply not working. A “use it or lose it” principle will give councils proper compulsory purchase powers to tackle land-hoarding, and powers to charge developers escalating fees where they are banking land with planning permissions. The delivery of a new generation of new
towns and garden cites is a proposition that is common to all parties now, I believe, and should be welcomed. We wish to see reform of the housing revenue account system, creating a less bureaucratic and more flexible system that enables councils to build, and backing communities by giving them a greater share of the benefits from development.
We also need to boost small to medium-sized housebuilders. Access to land is crucial and we would require local authorities to include a higher proportion of small sites in their five-year land supply to boost small and custom-build, with guaranteed access to public land for smaller firms and custom builders. We would commit that a proportion of the homes built in new towns and garden cities would be built by smaller firms and custom builders; increase transparency in the land market by ensuring that developers register the land they own and have options on; and give people the chance to sign up for a waiting list for custom-build co-operative homes or community land trust projects, with local people having priority.
Having set this out, there is clearly a need to seek a long-term consensus, that is, not fractured by a four or five-year Parliament and changes in Governments, to address the housing crisis. We have been able to forge some longer term consensus around public and private pensions policy, for example, although that grappled with how much and who pays rather than where it goes, which is an extra dimension of a housing consensus. We seem to be in an era where there is some agreement about new towns and garden cities being a route towards a step-change around housing provision. Whether there is a shared vision of what this means is another matter, but it provides some prospect of delivering over the long term.
Can the local planning system deliver large-scale growth? It might be argued that there is in principle no barrier, but it would be challenging, especially if we contemplate, as we do, the scale of development contemplated by a new towns programme. The noble Lord’s amendment sees salvation in larger scale developments being facilitated by the use of the major infrastructure planning regime, but like the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, we have some reservations about this approach if the scale of the development is that of the new towns model. As the TCPA put it,
“the complexity of creating a whole New Town is such there is much more to do, over a much longer timescale, than building specific infrastructure, no matter how large or complex”.
There is a case for using the infrastructure route for developments which might sit in size between new towns and smaller scale developments, perhaps as an intermediate approach. The difficulty is where it leaves the local planning authority—the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin—which has the key responsibility to plan for the housing which is needed over the local plan period. We propose that its role will be enhanced in this respect by our “right to grow” proposals, so we have some reservations about the amendment, which we accept is a probing amendment. We have no reservations in recognising that there is a need for a long-term policy to tackle our housing crisis and the role that housing associations, in particular, can play in this.
I went back to the debates we had just over a year ago on this issue during the passage of the Growth and Infrastructure Bill. The Minister’s predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, set out the Government’s position, which was the importance of the local planning authority in these matters, with the reservation that if major schemes that might indicate a need for a decision at national level came forward, the call-in route might be a way of dealing with that. I do not know whether that is still the Government’s policy, but that may bridge the situation between larger scale developments and the role of the local planning authority, which we have always seen as sacrosanct and a key building block of effective planning and the creation of the homes that we need.