My Lords, first, I declare interests as an elected councillor in Lewisham and as a trustee of United St Saviour’s Charity, which runs a number of supported housing schemes in south London.
I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, who is the directly elected mayor of Watford and brings her vast experience of local government to this debate. I read that she is a supporter of Watford Football Club. All I can say is that I hope that my team meets her team one day in
the Premiership—although, as a lifelong supporter of Millwall Football Club, I imagine that that could take a couple of years yet. I also look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, who is an elected hereditary Peer, a Cross-Bencher, a parish councillor and a chartered surveyor by profession. Both the noble Baroness and the noble Lord are very welcome at our deliberations today.
We are in the midst of a housing crisis, with the lowest level of housebuilding since the 1920s. The number of homes completed in 2014 reached 117,000, which is less than the lowest number of homes built under the last Labour Government. Last year, the Government built the fewest homes for social rent in more than two decades—just under 11,000 compared with 33,000 in Labour’s last year of office. In addition, there is an ever-increasing housing benefit bill, which has grown by £2 billion in five years, and a shocking increase in homelessness and rough sleeping. We have had five years of failure, and the response from the Government is the Housing and Planning Bill. It is not the Bill to meet the challenge that we face or to give people hope that things will change and get better.
There are parts of the Bill that we can support, including action to deal with rogue landlords, the section on self-build and custom-built housing, and action to speed up compulsory purchase. We will seek to strengthen these measures as the Bill goes through your Lordships’ House.
However, most of the Bill contains measures that we cannot support. We will be seeking to persuade the Government that their proposals will do nothing to help a family struggling to make ends meet and who will be worried that their rent is going to be hiked up to unaffordable levels due to the pay-to-stay measures. Nor will they help a young couple living in the private rented sector who will face ever-increasing rent rises and look with despair at the new starter home proposals. These unrealistic proposals will deliver nothing for them.
We on these Benches are supportive of measures to increase home ownership, but the starter homes product is still unaffordable to many people. We have concerns about the deposit that people will need to raise to purchase one of these homes in London and about the level of income that will be needed to keep up the repayments. It has been suggested that an income in the region of £77,000 a year could be required. The Council of Mortgage Lenders is also raising concerns that the scheme as presently proposed could prove very unattractive to lenders. So we have a scheme that is unaffordable to many prospective first-time buyers, and a financial services industry that is at best a bit lukewarm about the proposals, with some lenders considering whether they want to be part of the scheme at all.
Others have raised concerns about the scheme. They include Mr Nick Hurd, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, who thought that the £450,000 price cap was more likely to be seen as a price guide by developers. Concerns were also raised by Ms Nicola Blackwood, the Conservative Member for Oxford West and Abingdon in the other place. In addition, London Councils and
others have said that the powers to be taken by the Secretary of State must be used in a proportionate way that takes account of local housing need before overriding any local policy document. Quite rightly, local authorities in London want assurances that local overall housing need will be taken into account and that this policy will not just be forced through without any reference to local circumstances. I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, will address that specific point at the end of the debate. Will she also comment on how the infrastructure required for these starter homes will be funded?
As I said earlier, we have no particular issues with the section of the Bill concerned with self-build and custom housebuilding, although we will explore through probing amendments whether anything further can be done to improve these measures.
Another aspect of the Bill that causes concern is the forced sale of so-called high-value council housing to fund the extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants. There appears to be no proper plan for the replacement of these homes on a like-for-like basis in the areas where the homes are sold. The loss of a social rented property and its replacement with an affordable rented property—which, in many parts of the country and in particular London, is actually unaffordable—risks breaking up communities. However, this big plan of the Government is not funded by them; it is funded by penalising local authorities in a most unfair way.
In responding to the debate, will the Minister answer the question concerning many London local authorities: will housing associations be required to replace the property in the same area, the same London borough or even in London, or can they put it where they like? What happens if the local authority has transferred all its stock and has no housing to sell? Can she also tell us what will be done if the receipts do not cover everything that is meant to be funded out of the sale, such as the debt charge on the property, the provision of the new home, the brownfield levy et cetera?
Again, in the other place, concerns on this aspect of the Bill were raised by many Members, including Conservative Members such as Dr Sarah Wollaston, the Member for Totnes, particularly in respect of the effect on rural communities of housing associations selling their properties. We share those concerns and I hope that the Minister will seek to alleviate them in her response today. These are matters on which I am sure we will bring forward amendments for consideration in your Lordships’ House.
Another area where disquiet has been raised is the pay-to-stay scheme. If not implemented properly, the scheme runs the risk of negatively affecting the social mix of boroughs and penalising people on modest incomes. Earning limits of £40,000 in London and £30,000 elsewhere are just not realistic. With just a cursory look on a job website, you can find, for example, an office administrator being paid £25,000 a year, or a Sainsbury’s internet shopper—the person who puts all the groceries in the bags before they are delivered to your front door—being paid £16,000 a year. Those figures are for a 40-hour week, before tax, in London. With those or a similar combination of
jobs, a couple would easily find that they had breached the income threshold of £40,000. The situation is equally unrealistic outside London, with a cap of just £30,000. Add to that a young person who cannot afford to rent a place of their own and is still living with mum and dad, and you have a family in a really difficult situation.
I live in Lewisham in a very ordinary terrace house, for which I have a mortgage. Rents for similar properties in the private sector locally have reached £2,500 a month or £30,000 a year. The proposals in this Bill put people on modest incomes at risk of finding themselves having to pay a market rent, or so-called affordable rent or some other variation, which would be considerably more than they paid before. That is just unfair. We on these Benches will seek to make the system fairer, more realistic and more understanding of people’s circumstances.
During the passage of the Bill, we also want to examine the nature of the voluntary deal that has been reached between the Government and housing associations and to ensure proper protection for specialist housing, including supported housing.
We on these Benches welcome proposals to bring stricter enforcement to the private rented sector, in particular the introduction of banning orders, along with a rogue landlord database, the expansion of rent repayment orders, and equipping local authorities with information on landlords and their properties through the tenancy deposit scheme, as well as the introduction of fixed-penalty notices. There are, of course, some very good examples of progressive, forward-thinking local authorities, such as Newham and Waltham Forest, that have already been actively working to improve the standards in the private rented sector in their boroughs for many years. There is also a case for the devolution of power from the Secretary of State to the Mayor of London, and so getting the London local authorities and the mayor to work more closely together to make real improvements. The financial penalties for breaches by landlords, introduced by the Government during Report in the other place, are very much welcome in that respect.
We do, however, have concerns about the new fast-track eviction process for landlords to reclaim their property without reference to the courts. That could put tenants in a very vulnerable position, and we will want to explore this during consideration of the Bill. What are the protections for tenants from being illegally evicted by the very rogue landlords we have just been talking about? It would be helpful to the House if the Minister could again explain why the Government thought it necessary to include this provision. What evidence do they have to suggest that abandonment is such a significant problem, and what is in place to protect tenants from illegal eviction?
At present, the Bill does not include anything on protecting tenants in the private rented sector from electrical accidents caused by unchecked and faulty electrical installations. These matters were debated at some length in the other place, but so far the Government have not been persuaded. I very much agree that a mandatory five-year electrical safety check in the private rented sector is both necessary and welcome. Each year, 20,000 fires are caused by electrical faults, which is
almost half of all accidental house fires. We will bring forward amendments to make such tests mandatory, and I hope that the Government will listen to the compelling case and move on from their present position, which says there is an expectation on landlords to keep electrical installations safe.
The planning aspects of the Bill will be explored in more detail by my noble friend Lord Beecham and other noble Lords in today’s debate. However, the Bill lacks vision and seems to regard the effective operation of a planning system as a constraint to development and nothing more. The removal of Section 106 contributions from the starter home developments through to in-principle planning consent and the call-in provisions to be given to the Secretary of State are all matters we will want to discuss further.
We need local authorities and communities to be empowered to ensure that local development proposals meet local development needs. It again will be helpful if the noble Baroness can explain to the House how these proposals extend and develop localism—which, again, like the big society, is often only mentioned by opposition spokespersons in the course of debates such as this. I am a supporter of neighbourhood planning and in Crofton Park, the ward I represent on Lewisham Council, we are working hard to set up a neighbourhood forum, but nothing in this Bill will help local people to have a greater say over the kind of developments that are built in their community.
There are, of course, other groups that must be considered as the Bill makes its way through your Lordships’ House. These include berth holders, who are considered as a housing group by the department but are not mentioned in the Bill. Certainly in London, residential use of the waterways has grown considerably, with households living on the water and not only using boats for recreational activity. Again, I would refer the noble Baroness to the actions of Mr Johnny Mercer, the Member for Plymouth, Moor View, in the other place, who has taken the decision to live on his boat in Canada Water in Southwark rather than pay the expensive property prices in London. People like Mr Mercer and others who live on our waterways deserve proper protection and engagement from their local authority and the department.
Other concerns will be raised by noble Lords during the passage of this Bill, including those of travelling show people and the travelling community.
I grew up on a council estate in Southwark. I am always very grateful that my parents were rehoused by Southwark Council; that they had a secure tenancy; and that the property we lived in was safe, warm, dry and maintained properly by the council. The rent was paid by my parents and we were able to live both happily and securely in Walworth, playing our part in the local community. We were not worried about only having a two-year tenancy—were we going to have to move, where were we going to live, was the rent going to become unaffordable? I can see no benefit in these proposals regarding tenancies. They will only make families and vulnerable people feel more insecure and worried about their future, and cause deep anxiety and upset.
This Government do not like council housing or social rents. At its heart, the Bill does everything it can to undermine this type of housing. That is a matter of much regret. I hope that noble Lords from all sides of the House will work together to make much needed improvements to this generally dreadful Bill.
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