My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. The Minister should really thank us for doing this now.
If he has not picked up that this measure is going to be one of those things that will be extremely hard to get through this House, then he has heard nothing. I realise that he is new to the House, but if he listened to what was said on Thursday, including from his own party, he will know that this one ain’t going to happen. Therefore, I think that he will in the long term be grateful to us for having given due warning and enabled him to steer his colleagues off a track which will be highly bumpy for them.
If the Minister hears nothing else from today, he should listen to what my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours said. These homes were built not just for one lot of lucky people; they were built not just for one generation but in perpetuity. He has given no answer on that point, because once you sell them off, they are gone. I was disappointed that the Minister said that it was all about income. No, this is not about income; it is about communities. They could be homes rented out, for example, to a community of retired actors or retired nurses—I think that there is a housing association near Bournemouth where all its residents were in nursing and worked in that community together. If you sell that off, you do not just sell off a house and have the money back; you no longer have that shared understanding of the people who have been given a stake in that way. No, it is not just about money and I am sorry that the Minister used that phrase.
This issue is not just about charities; it goes wider. Loan sharks are already circulating. Most of the people who can take advantage of this measure have to be fairly rich, because, even with the £100,000 that the Government are going to give you from local government, you still have to get the other £100,000. On the whole, you have to be fairly rich; it is not the £15,000-a-year earners that my noble friend referred to. So it is already the top end of that market who can use it. For the ones below who cannot, the loan sharks are there saying, “You’re going to get £100,000 if you get this, so how about this? I give you the money, you get the mortgage for the other £100,000, you take the £100,000 that is coming, and in three years’ time I’ll be back and we’ll share it out. I’ll get £50,000 and you’ll get £50,000”. We know those people are there. That is not particularly about the charity aspect, but if the Government do not understand that that is what happens, they have learnt very little.
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There are issues about land being given free, and a Bishop—not the right reverend Prelate who is here today—mentioned rural land which has been given specifically to help the provision of affordable housing in rural areas. There is an iceberg about London, but there are enormous shortages of land in London. The issues are partly about this being for more than one generation, and partly that charity should go not just to one group of beneficiaries, including loan sharks. Partly there is the issue of the independence of charities, which my noble friend Lady Warwick spoke about, and partly I think the Minister misunderstood or did not read my amendment correctly. I said that charities should not be compelled to sell. They may well want to sell, and that is fine, but they should not be compelled to sell. He said they already can be. Normally, if there is a compulsory sale, it is to the state because the state
is about to put in a railway or a new sewage works. What is being suggested here is that properties should effectively be nationalised and then reprivatised, so the state is going to nationalise the private asset of a charity and then give it away at a reduced price to a tenant. That is quite new.
I am possibly taking the biggest decision I have taken in 30 years; I might be moving house, which is very scary, and I am looking at a flat in a shared development. There is some social housing, some shared ownership, and the stuff for the filthy rich, which is what I am going to buy—I may not be filthy rich—and the attraction is that I will not be living simply with the filthy rich group who can afford to buy, but it will be a shared community. It will have social housing, shared ownership and us lot. The thought that in 10 years’ time it will all be people like me and there will be nobody in social housing or shared ownership because the Government will have forced a sell off makes me ask whether that is what I want. I might just go and live somewhere else.
This policy has big implications, and I hope that the Minister will take this amendment very seriously, partly to save his Government getting defeated on this, and partly because this is right for charities. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.