My Lords, my noble friend has put a powerful case before the Committee. I have to say to the Minister that what he has to say will be circulated throughout the country and will be read by thousands of people and by many involved in the churches. Many would have been here to witness what he has to say if they had known this debate was to take place.
We had an early canter round the course last Thursday during a housing debate. Even on that occasion, with very little notice of the debate having been given, the speeches were circulated widely because everyone is waiting for the Government to take a decision to exempt at least certain categories. I am not going to refer specifically to the contribution that I made in that debate other than to say that I read out a letter from Mr Bill Bewley. I do not know whether the Minister has been given a copy of Mr Bewley’s correspondence. He nods to indicate that he has not seen it. I hope that he or his civil servants have time to read col. 1758 of Hansard of 25 June on the debate on affordable housing. A number of contributions were made on this issue.
The amendment says:
“Charities may not, and may not be compelled to, use or dispose of their assets in a way which is inconsistent with their charitable purposes”.
I speak to this amendment on behalf of a charity whose function is mirrored by hundreds of charities nationally. The Government’s objective, as set out, would require that charity to dispose of its housing assets. These assets have been built up by volunteers working in small communities without remuneration. They have built houses in Keswick in the Lake District, where I was once the Member of Parliament, and where, until recently, I had a home. They are but one
of 175 community land trusts across England. In this case, I am referring to the Keswick Community Housing Trust. By 2020, those community land trusts will build some 3,000 homes. Most of them are charities and they do not want to be forced to sell off their assets. They are not going to solve the nation’s housing supply problem but they will certainly make a meaningful contribution to resolving the crisis.
These community land trusts are local organisations, set up and run by local people unpaid to develop and manage homes as well as other assets important to a community, such as community shops, pubs or work spaces. Their primary objective is to develop homes that are genuinely affordable, not this nonsense that we hear in London in particular, where they talk about affordable rents being £1,600 a month or whatever. It is just ludicrous what is going on in London; what is described as affordable there makes a nonsense of the whole principle.
As I said, these community land trusts’ primary objective is to develop homes that are genuinely affordable based on what people earn in an area and to ensure that those homes remain affordable in perpetuity. I set out in last week’s debate the wages paid in Keswick over recent times and they bear no resemblance whatever to the so-called affordable rents that are being paid in many parts of the country. This housing trust in Keswick set out to provide affordable rents that people could actually afford—people who earn not £30,000, £40,000 or £50,000 a year but maybe £15,000, £18,000 or £20,000: a completely different market. That is where its concern is focused, but it is worried that the properties it has built will have to be sold off.
Last week I gave the House a description of what is going on in the Keswick community land trust in the Lake District. However, there are CLTs—community land trusts—in towns and cities around the country where the lack of affordable housing is just as much an issue as it is for popular rural communities like Keswick. I am trying to make the point that the very purpose of CLTs like Keswick Community Housing Trust is to develop homes that are affordable for local people in perpetuity. These CLT homes are not supposed to benefit just one generation but every future occupier. That very purpose of a CLT motivates local people such as Mr Bill Bewley of Keswick CLT, who I spoke of on Thursday, to spend thousands of hours volunteering their time to bring forward new homes.
Mr Bill Bewley is an active Quaker, and the Quakers are involved nationally in this kind of work, as are many other religious groups, which very often give of their time and form part of the membership of those trusts. In the case of the Keswick trust, it involved two people from the Church of England, one Methodist, one person from the Kings Church, a couple of Quakers, an Orthodox Christian and Catholics—in other words, a body of people who are committed by their religious beliefs and who get together and act in the public interest to produce houses that people can afford. Now they are fearful that their right to carry on with the brilliant work they do will effectively be removed because of a policy which they believe is ill-conceived.
Many community land trusts have developed homes for rent or are currently in the process of doing so. That work is going on all over the country. They are now vulnerable to the right to buy, either because they have had to register as a registered provider with the Homes and Communities Agency to receive an affordable homes programme grant or because they own freehold of a site and have leased the properties to a registered provider; that is, a housing association. The right to buy will not only affect those homes because it goes against the ability of a CLT to ensure that the homes remain affordable, but it could have a chilling effect on the whole sector.
If this measure is introduced for CLTs we will not see landowners being willing to dispose of land on favourable terms. I will explain what that means. The churches in Keswick—in this particular case it was the diocese in Carlisle—said to the trust, “You can have this piece of land, and we will charge you only £10,000 a plot”. Therefore they took it, and spent £110,000 on 11 plots. If that land had gone on the open market—in Keswick, in the Lake District, where there are very strict planning rules and where land is at a premium—it would have fetched a much higher price. In the event that those properties will be sold off, the beneficiaries of that charity will be individuals. I think that is completely wrong, as do probably many Conservative Members of Parliament in the other place, who I understand have privately indicated their concerns to Ministers, because they are under pressure from the lobbyists.
A family in Keswick called the Speddings—a local family, well known in the area for their charitable work—have sold a piece of land to the local housing trust for £12,500 per plot. Again, they are effectively giving that land away. Why should the benefit of that charity be passed to individuals? It is staggering madness that the Government are embarking on by going down this route.
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We certainly will not see people such as Bill Bewley being so willing to spend their evenings and weekends to develop much-needed affordable housing if it is only to be lost to the open market. Why should an individual who is motivated by his Christian beliefs, who spends his time, his life, involved in public works, go to all that effort, spending hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours building up and motivating the community to get together to produce such housing stock if suddenly the Government decide that they effectively want to give it away because of some political advantage that they think they may gain? Again, it is staggering madness.
The CLT sector has seen significant growth in the past four years, rising from 40 community land trusts in 2010 to now more than 170. As I said, they will not resolve the housing crisis in isolation, but they can make a very big contribution. I appeal to Ministers: do not take away the motivation. Those people must remain motivated. If the stock is sold off, they will be demotivated, and none of us wants that.
I therefore urge the Government to ensure that all CLTs, whether small or large, rural or urban, are made exempt from the right to buy. There must be exemptions.
I know that the Minister cannot just say today that that is going to happen—or perhaps he has been briefed to say that; I should like to think so, but I do not suppose that he will say that—but I want him and his department, with his civil servants, to go back to talk to people in other departments to see whether they can knock this policy on the head early on before it gets off the ground.
The Minister in the Commons spoke of engaging with the community land trust sector on the development of the right-to-buy policy. I put it to this Minister, responsible for charities, speaking here in the House of Lords, that he, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, who has responsibility in another department, might call in people from the community land trusts to talk to them about their problems and see whether a way around this can be found. I ask whether Ministers are making contact with the National CLT Network as the national charity for CLTs to discuss the implications of the right to buy for those organisations, and whether the Government might look sympathetically on an amendment, or even table their own amendment, to ensure that this particular sector of the housing association movement is exempt from what I can only refer to once again as this staggering nonsense which should be stopped at birth.