My Lords, is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, who raised important questions on taxation, which I will come back to in a moment. I congratulate Ministers on their appointments and wish them well in their roles. We look forward to working with them constructively in the months and years ahead. I look forward very much to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Fuller. Since I will address one or two local government issues, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
I wish the Government a fair wind. The public are crying out for stable and responsible government with a clear sense of direction. We need an end to the boosterism of recent Governments, an end to poorly drafted Bills, and an end to Governments announcing policies that cannot be delivered. The electorate expect this new Government to pursue a reform agenda, and they are clearly doing that. I am pleased that their intentions were demonstrated by early announcements, such as the decision on onshore wind turbines, and by the gracious Speech yesterday. Public expectations are high, so the Government’s pace is most welcome.
We will all have our lists of priorities for the Government to undertake to make a difference in this first Session of the Parliament. For me, the drive to clean up our rivers and watercourses and the need for adequate water supplies to support growth are paramount. I want the Government to address child poverty. They should urgently abolish the two-child limit. It would cost just £1.7 billion and make a huge difference to those children and their families, and to their health and well-being.
I want the Government to find a solution to bed-blocking and the crisis in social care. I think there is to be a royal commission to fix social care, but it was not announced in the King’s Speech yesterday. It would be helpful to know what is planned for that, because bed-blocking is causing serious problems for both the National Health Service and local government finances.
The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, talked about regressive taxation. For me, it is a priority to end this. During the election, Labour talked a lot about not raising taxes, but it meant only income tax, national insurance and VAT. What about the social care precept and council tax? They are regressive taxes, and I hope the Government will agree to stop adding to the social care precept. As a regressive tax, it impacts most on people who are already poor.
I welcome greater investment in the UK by our pension funds—I hope that will happen—as well as plans generally to enhance private investment in our infrastructure. I welcome the plans to build more homes, but please can these be genuinely affordable for people on average incomes? I wish the Government would cease the use of the term “affordable” when they are nothing of the sort for many aspiring to secure their own homes. Rent levels should not exceed a third of household income. In London, for example, it is often over 50%. I particularly welcome plans to introduce the leasehold and common- hold reform Bill and the renters reform Bill, both of which are urgently needed.
On the planning and infrastructure Bill, I say that the need for more housing is clearly extremely important. I am pleased to see the aim of increasing community gain from planning permissions. It is also good to see the commitment to building more homes, particularly homes for social rent, without which the crisis of homelessness cannot be addressed. The number of homes for social rent fell by 260,000 over the last 10 years, through demolitions, the right to buy and the re-designation of homes from social rent to affordable rent. Over the years, right to buy has been abused by private landlords who buy up social rented homes and place them in the private rented sector. I hope this problem will be addressed as part of this Bill, not least the level of the right-to-buy discount.
The major cause of the high cost of housing has been a lack of supply. Demand was encouraged through schemes such as Help to Buy but, in the end, while helping some new owners, this increased prices and boosted demand but left supply at too low a level. The Government now commit to building 1.5 million new homes over five years, at an average of 300,000 a year. But what about the 1.2 million existing planning permissions awaiting buildout? It is reported that, since 2015, 2.7 million homes have been granted planning permission but only 1.5 million have actually been built. I hope Ministers might clarify the numbers, either now or in writing. Are the Government talking about 1.5 million additional to the existing 1 to 1.2 million homes that have planning permission but have not been built? If it is both added together, that means that the Government plan to deliver some 2.7 million houses for people to live in. This would be most welcome, but I have not understood the numbers. Will the Government confirm that they will not count office conversions to small, single-person units as part of that? Will they penalise slow buildout once permission is secured?
Our failure to build enough homes is not just down to the planning system. Ministers need to consider incentives to increase the number of small local builders. They need to look at greater use state-owned land, which represents 6% of all freehold land in the UK. They are committed, I think—I would like to hear them repeat it—to building homes that are sustainable to low-carbon standards and to improving nature conservancy as they do that. That can be done. There are many examples of it being done, but I hope the Government are committed to doing it.
Mention has been made of 300 more planning officers. It is actually a very low number. I hope that the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, of increasing planning fees to help pay for it will be taken on board.
The Government need too to look carefully at how they deliver improvements in infrastructure such as transport, health facilities and schools earlier than currently, when they often follow the building as opposed to being built alongside it.
I think there will be a big row about the setting of targets—the “how, not if”, as the Government have said. Whose responsibility will it be to agree those targets? Is it Whitehall? Is it the mayoral combined authorities? Is it the local planning authority? I am in favour of targets—they help to deliver the outcomes we want and to give a common understanding of need and ambition—but I hope the Government can clarify who is in charge of the “how” rather than the “if”.
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