My Lords, my Amendment 21 joins a queue to add, amend or clarify missions. This queue can feel a little like a fanciful—farcical, even—wish list, but the Government only have themselves to blame for the fact that some of us are just trying to pin down these missions rather than rely on guesswork.
My guess is that, as much as the Bill relates to planning, it is not unreasonable to assume that there will be a housing mission. Indeed, in the missions published in February 2022 we are told so. However, I was shocked when I read its content: increase home ownership and housing standards, tick; more first-time buyers in all geographical areas, tick; and a 50% reduction in non-decent rented homes, tick. But, extraordinarily, there is no mention of increasing the supply of houses or of targets to build more homes at a time when we need that to happen with missionary zeal if we are to stand a chance of making levelling up more than a slogan.
If the Government are serious about increasing home ownership, having more first-time buyers and ensuring that the rented sector expands and improves, we need more houses or the policy will run into the housing affordability road block. We heard a lot about affordability from the previous speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Stunell. At present, the average home costs over eight times average annual earnings, as against the historic norm of three to four times. Put bluntly, house prices and rents have risen beyond what any reasonable person would think it acceptable to spend on one of the most basic human needs. Those high prices and rents are responsible for many of the social ills that the Bill is allegedly designed to address—from worsening living conditions, falling home ownership, rising homelessness and the spiralling costs of housing benefit.
Half of all first-time buyers—rising to two-thirds in the south-east—rely on the so-called “bank of mum and dad”, which is fine if you have parents who can do that for you, although, with more and more mums and dads suffering the brunt of the cost of living crisis, that might be on the wane, anyway. Those who cannot turn to their parents are not only left behind but, ironically, end up paying a lot more in rent each month than their peers with a mortgage. Meanwhile, renters in London spend 40% of their income on rent, which is simply unaffordable, and rental prices are being pushed up by supply not meeting demand. We therefore need to build more houses to bring prices into line with earnings, whether we are buying or renting.
The hugely impressive housing campaign group Priced Out, staffed by young people who are passionate about housing, explains this well. It says:
“The affordability of housing is a significant concern for millions of people. If we don’t fix the root cause of this problem, we will continue to ruin lives and futures”.
Priced Out has hopes that the Bill will tackle that root cause. So do I, and that is what my amendment is about.
Of course, there is more to this than a demand for paper targets. Just because something is written down, I do not necessarily trust it. Over the years, we have all heard endless pledges from Governments of all stripes included in all political parties’ election manifestos, yet we still have a supply problem. The UK remains one of the slowest and least prolific homebuilding countries among all 28 members of the OECD. Too often, under previous Administrations’ versions of housing missions, we have seen distractions from the core issue of increasing the supply side.
This Government in particular have tended to fall back on headline-grabbing demand-side quick fixes, such as help-to-buy schemes. However, this arguably makes things worse. Demand skyrockets by giving young, aspiring homeowners a state loan. But that means that prices go up, especially if we plod along with a fixed, stagnating supply of homes.
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This just leads to a transfer of ownership of existing housing stock without necessarily prompting any new building. Big housebuilders benefit from the state subsidy, with little incentive to build more. However, how much time opposition parties especially spend fetishising the types of new homes that should be built and who should build them has also been frustrating. This has ranged from demands for sustainable houses to—with no disrespect to the previous speaker—a focus on affordable homes. It often takes the form of stating that, for example, social housing should be prioritised. Surely who builds the homes that people need and what labels we give them should not be a matter of ideological dogma. We need a greater ambition than piecemeal political silos. If we built the number of houses that we need, more homes would be affordable.
The Bill needs to tackle the National Audit Office’s declaration that we need to build 250,000 more homes a year to take into account decreasing building since the 1960s and the deterioration and demolition of current housing stock. That is a conservative figure to deal with the actual shortfall. Some experts suggest that it is more like 340,000 a year until 2030 to tackle the backlog, and as PricedOut notes, even that figure fails to include the wider homeless population and those under 40 who are struggling on exorbitant rents.
However, even if we stick to the NAO’s target, surely that ought to be easily achievable given that in the 1960s, when housing and construction technologies were far less developed, 300,000 new homes were built annually. Too often, politicians suggest that we face insurmountable social challenges today, that all sorts of problems besiege us, but that can be used as an excuse. Politicians coming out of a world war in the 1940s and 1950s did not hold back from doggedly realising housing ambitions—ambitions that did not seem feasible but which created whole new towns. Lord Reith at the time called the new town plan an “essay on civilisation”. My theory is that in 2023 this Bill, unless it tackles housing supply, might indicate that civilisation is in decline.
We need to be ruthless—ruthlessly honest, anyway—in asking why it has become so difficult for Governments across the party spectrum to provide the homes that
society needs. We need to identify what has gone wrong if this Bill, or the whole project of levelling up, is to tackle it. We know that it is not a problem of space or land shortage. Nearly 90% of land in England is not built on. Only 1.1% is used for residential housing, and that includes gardens. One problem is getting planning permission to build. We will be looking at that, and I will be commenting on it in a lot more detail, later in the Bill. However, it is frustrating that plenty of land does have planning permission but is held by big builders and land agents who see it as more productive to sit on it than to build homes in the present period. Yes, the Bill must tackle land banking, although it is not a black and white issue as it is sometimes portrayed.
We also know that there is one quick fix that could free up land now and allow building to start. The Government have access to land that could easily be released for development at the stroke of a pen and allow construction projects to start immediately. The problem is that this land is being banked but under the artificial designation of “green belt”. The green belt covers 12% of England’s land and ring-fences off large swathes of land around towns and cities that, despite its name, certainly does not comprise our green and pleasant land, nor is it the green space that the Government and all of us say that everyone should have access to. At the very least, a debate on the green belt should be part of the solution rather than being ruled out of play for fear of upsetting green lobbyists. That would represent a radical shake-up of land to build on and it is preferable to being restricted to the paltry drip-drip supply of previously developed brownfield sites that politicians suggest. As author James Heartfield notes, millions of new homes are not going to be built
“on a handful of derelict RAF bases”.
We must acknowledge that the many blocks to housebuilding are political choices. Increasingly, planning decisions and policy decisions are likely to prioritise fashionable eco concerns over citizens’ needs, prosperity, development or growth. Indeed, green ideological restrictions on housebuilding are now giving old-fashioned nimbyist concerns a veneer of progressive righteousness.
To finish, my question to the Minister is: why do the Government say they are listening to home owners, when they crumbled in the face of the Villiers amendment in the other place, but fail to hear the voice of young, self-styled yimbys saying gladly, “Yes, in my backyard” and declaring, “New homes welcome here”? I am wary of scapegoating nimbys, however, and the Bill could put forward a persuasive alternative vision. It should be not a caricature of plonking new builds on the edge of a beautiful village but offering housebuilding as part of a dynamic plan for areas that are neglected. Young people are leaving them because of a lack of infrastructure, homes and jobs, but they could come alive if we use housing in the right way. Levelling up should surely mean bringing towns, city outskirts and suburbs—even villages—alive with roads, rail links, schools, hospitals and investment in new industries, skills, jobs and training. This will make places where people want to live and work, and that is why we will need houses there. People will welcome them, even if they were previously nimbys.
I just emphasise that housing is not just a desperately urgent social need but part of the mix of creating thriving multigenerational communities across the UK. Tackling housing supply and putting it front and centre of any housing mission is part of making this vision a concrete reality, and I really hope that the housing mission goes beyond mere platitudes and says, “Build more houses now!”