My Lords, I support Amendment 1. For the purposes of Report, I declare my interests as a farmer and landowner, as a rural landlord of domestic property, and as the ultimate landowner of an exception site leased to Hastoe Housing Association.
I wish to make only one point—to re-emphasise what others have hinted at. We are all aware of the shortage of affordable housing in our country. We are also aware that this is not a short-term problem. I expect that most of us will have received the rather bleak report from the National Federation of Property Professionals, predicting that property prices and rents will continue to rise until at least 2025 because of the shortage of housing, particularly affordable housing. Meanwhile, the Government have promised to build 200,000 new starter homes by 2020. This will be the main plank in their policy to deal with the severe shortage of affordable housing. Let us say that it is 50,000 starter homes a year, although I expect that it is even more than that by now. The transience—that is the key word—of these starter homes, which causes them to fall out of the affordable sector currently after only five years, maybe eight, means that we will have to go on building 50,000 starter homes a year for ever.
We are trying to fill the bath with the plug taken out. Amendment 1 is an effort to put the plug back in. Therefore, I strongly support it.