Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Blackstone
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, the amendment moves away from the intentions outlined in the Conservative manifesto, but while the amendment would prevent the duty to consider selling applying for a period of six months following a vacancy, the requirement of payments to the Secretary of State would not be changed. However, we monitor all policy as we go along.
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
I once again press the Minister on the issue of moving to the affirmative procedure. I have raised this question on other days. It has been raised twice this afternoon. On no occasion has the Minister answered the question of when the Government will let this House know whether they are prepared to move in this direction. That would be a much more satisfactory approach to dealing with the detail of the regulations.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Blackstone
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I have asked for additional briefings to be provided over the next week or so, until we come to the Recess, and I will be attending them. They might help me; I certainly hope they will help noble Lords. It is very helpful for me to be there and to understand what sort of issues noble Lords are bringing up. I totally accept that I committed to giving that timeline, and it will be with noble Lords in the next week or so.
I have met each political group within your Lordships’ House; I hope that noble Lords have found that helpful. Some points that noble Lords bring up in debate definitely inform government thinking, because this House has more local government leaders and representatives in it—and experts on the Cross Benches—than the other place. Therefore, this House will be very helpful in informing the Government.
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the Minister, but I just wanted to make a brief point. Useful as ministerial briefings are—they are very valuable and are given much more than they used to be when I was a Minister—they are not a substitute for having the regulations in draft form, which we really need to examine the Bill properly in Committee. I hope that she will accept that point and pass it on. It is not a matter of criticising officials—it is not the role of parliamentarians to criticise officials—but I am very critical of LegCo, or whatever the Cabinet committee is now called, which agreed to put the Bill into both Houses without doing the necessary work beforehand.
Perhaps the Minister can also respond to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, about the affirmative procedure; she has not given an answer to that. It is vital in this particular case.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I will be responding formally to the DPRRC’s report, and specifically to that point, very soon indeed. I think that I said that to the noble Lord either earlier today or at our previous sitting.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
It would depend on the context of the succession. If the successor was a spouse, there would not be a vacancy because that spouse would be immediately, automatically entitled to take on a future lifetime tenancy. If, for example, a child wanted to take over a tenancy, it would probably be short term. The only automatic right is with a spouse.
Baroness Blackstone
May I also seek clarification? What if a tenancy comes to an end and there is a long waiting list of potential tenants with very urgent housing needs, of the sort described by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington—very large families, homeless people, people living in totally inadequate private rented housing with large numbers of small children? Is the Minister saying those groups are to be ignored, in spite of their acute housing need; that in an authority where there is not enough social housing to go round, the local authority is to be forced to sell that high-value property, which is possibly quite big and therefore suitable for some of these families with acute housing need?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, the vacant high-value asset may not necessarily be a big property; it could be a small property, but the point is that it is of high value and vacant. The sale of these high-value vacant properties will add to the number of homes for a variety of reasons for people all over the country.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Blackstone
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, if you look at the demographic, you see that it is this age group that is restricted. I take the noble Baroness’s point about accountants and doctors, but it takes quite a long time to earn a decent salary in either of those professions—I am married to someone in one of them. It is the age group that has been so badly restricted, and that is why the age group was selected.
Baroness Blackstone
My Lords, I am very sorry to interrupt the Minister yet again, but on various occasions during this debate she has talked about abuse. The biggest abuse of all, which will be a consequence of the Bill, is very highly paid young people in their 30s benefiting from a very large discount—in London, it could be £80,000 or £90,000. Surely the Government should be concerned about that. It will bring the legislation for starter homes into disrepute, and rightly so. I reiterate the concern around the House about this issue and ask the Minister to reconsider whether there should not be a government amendment on this issue.
Baroness Grender (LD)
My Lords, the Minister has ruled out a mortgage but, in this context, perhaps the Government could right here, right now, today rule out cash buyers. That gives us something more specific to hold on to here. Or can the Minister envisage a cash buyer in this scenario who would not have an unnecessary advantage?
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Blackstone
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, they would. But the principle behind the Government’s initiative is that within a few years people can start to move up the property ladder, but we want to help them to move on rather more quickly than the noble Lord suggests.
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
My Lords, I am puzzled by what the Minister is saying. There are hundreds of thousands of young people who have had to buy a small flat early in their lives, at the point when they need to have housing. Very often they have got married and they may have a baby. They then have a second child. They make some savings and move to something larger. They do not have big discounts. So why is the Minister saying that this very small group of people should have such a very large sum of money thrown at them? It really is very difficult to understand.
The Minister has said throughout this debate that she is concerned that other forms of housing and tenure should all be provided with support as well, yet everything she says in response to this debate suggests that starter homes have become of such enormous significance to the Government’s policy that very large sums of money are being promoted to be provided for a relatively small group of people who will, very often, not be the really poor or even middle-income young people but relatively well-off young people. I cannot understand why the Minister thinks that, when it comes to wanting to move to a larger house, this group is not capable of doing what everybody that has been in this group before without a starter home benefit has been able to do. It just does not add up. It is also incredibly inequitable. In fact, the whole scheme is incredibly inequitable. I would have thought that the Government would want to look at the distributional consequences of a scheme of this sort: not just the costs and benefits, as was suggested earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, but who benefits and who does not benefit. The Committee deserves to know something about this, and we have not been told.
At face value, it looks to me as if a large number of people, including young people who want to buy homes, are going to get nothing out of this while a very small number are going to get a great deal and will continue to get a great deal. The Government and the Minister refuse to see that a perpetuity provision such as that proposed in this group of amendments would help to counter some of the criticisms that Members of the Committee have given in the debate this afternoon.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, the noble Baroness asks who will benefit. Young people will benefit, and history shows us that it is young people for whom home ownership has been out of reach.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Blackstone(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford
But they have revenue and capital reserves. I do understand local authority obligations on reserves.
The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, talked about the impact on tenants. The Government published an impact assessment, which included the impact on protected groups. A third of social renters actually pay less. However, I will write to the noble Baroness more fully on impact because I realise that I did not answer her question on the last group of amendments.
Baroness Blackstone
I am not sure that the Minister has understood my question. It was about the impact of a reduction in rent on the Government’s housebuilding targets. What is her view on that? The Government ought to have some idea now; although it also ought, along the lines of my noble friend Lord McKenzie’s amendment, to be monitoring this, perhaps not just over 12 months but over a longer period, to get some sort of understanding of what the impact is. No Government should come up with a proposal of this sort when they have committed to an increase in the number of houses being built without some understanding of what its impact will be.