My Lords, I offer Green support for the general direction of all of these amendments. I will attempt not to repeat the tale of woe we heard, but I will make a couple of additional points and also pass on some good news, because I think we need some at this point. In the debate on the last group, I should have declared and put on the record that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
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On the good news, it is worth looking at how great work done is being done around the country, on a limited and small scale, to bring empty houses back to becoming homes again. In Preston, there is a scheme called Making Homes from Houses, which has already refurbished 30 empty homes that, collectively, were empty for a net 112 years. The process is under way for 20 more. In Hastings, a community group called Hastings Commons has been converting so-called tricky buildings into homes and eventually establishing them as community land trusts. So some really good things are happening, but very much on a small scale. We have to understand that where we are now is not any kind of inevitability but the result of decisions and policies that this group of amendments collectively seeks to find ways to change.
This certainly belongs in the levelling-up Bill. According to the most recent figures I could find on long-term empty homes, the top five cities—Birmingham, Liverpool, Durham, Bradford and Sheffield—are areas where properties often may not have a very high value, so people just leave them to sit there because it does not feel worth it to do anything with them. By contrast, I would be interested to hear if anyone has any thoughts on what to do with what I would have to describe as the obscenity of “buy to leave” in some of the wealthiest areas of the country, where people buy what could be a home for someone and just hang on to it as an asset that they assume will appreciate, but never live in it or do anything with it. I wonder whether we could do something about that, because this is not a large group but it is a big issue in areas of the country with the most intense housing pressure.
On short-term lets, it is worth noting some figures that I found: in some areas, renting a home for 10 weeks through Airbnb can pay as much as a full-term year-long let to a normal local tenant. So we have an absolute market failure, and we need to intervene here to ensure that we get the kind of outcomes that we need, which surely should be homes being regarded as secure and
affordable places for people to live, not primarily as financial assets. Of course, getting to that ideal scenario will require a lot more change than is proposed in this group, but at least here we are heading in the right direction. I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, that some steps are being made, but they are not nearly fast enough.