Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Just to be clear, my Lords, I have no problems at all where a city has a tradition or a history of having parish councils and wants to use those as the vehicles for neighbourhood planning. All I am saying is that where this is not part of that authentic, organic texture of a city, but where there is a network of other forms of civic groups, community groups and so on—particularly where you have cities with very tight boundaries and very constrained lines—there can be tensions. If Exeter has overcome those, that is great. All I can say from my experience of 25 years of local government is that some of the most difficult decisions concerned precisely those tensions. Obviously one would work with them, and I agree that the neighbourhood planning councils would have to have planning proposals that conformed to the city-wide ones. I accept that, but one should not underestimate the locality—ward councillors and so on, as many of us have been—when it comes to how those tensions can occur. All I am saying is: by all means encourage local authorities to go down this road where there is already a history of parishes of this sort, but do not assume that this is the answer to the deeper problems of keeping a city alive, vibrant and able to respond confidently to new challenges. That is why I have some reservations about trying to suggest that it should apply across the board and that we should be actively encouraging it where people do not want it.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)
I am a councillor in Lewisham and Crofton Park. At the moment we are in the process of setting up our own neighbourhood plan, which is very good and I welcome it. Equally, though, it has not answered all the problems. We have some challenges in our area, such as ensuring that there is proper retail provision. We have sites of multiple occupation with no building taking place, and so on. So the plan is all very good and I am supportive of it, but my noble friend has raised some genuine points.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
Many of the amendments in this group are probing ones and these matters would be better left to regulations. However, we come back to the problem: we have not got any regulations so scrutiny is extremely difficult. That leaves us having to put down amendments on these issues to try to drag out the Government’s thinking. At the end of the day, the amendments are on the Order Paper today only because the Government have sought to push the Bill through at such a pace and not wait for the regulations to be made.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, the Minister has now said twice that, under her proposals, any household paying a higher rent under pay to stay should, instead, be thinking about right to buy, and that she would prefer them to do that. If they are local authority tenants, can afford to do so, and wish to, they will already have taken this up. Why does she think they have not? One reason is that, with renting, changes in housing benefit and UC can be made in the course of the year if income fluctuates and circumstances change—the very situation which tax credits were devised to adjust. If you commit yourself to buying a property, no such consideration takes place of whether you can, or cannot, afford your mortgage repayments. If you are struggling with your income, your zero-hour contract has collapsed, or your partner has gone somewhere else, you are still stuck with it. Tenants may, therefore, have very good reasons—this obsession with pushing those who have chosen not to buy into right to buy, and whipping them there by virtue of the pay-to-stay rent policy, is disgraceful.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I also support my noble friend’s amendments. Like him and many others in this House, I have been a local authority leader. Many of us have been housing chairs, possibly on the way to becoming local authority leaders. Whenever we went round on what we used to call site visits, we could tell the stable community estates. They were the ones with no graffiti and no litter; in which people had carved out gardens around the base of flats or had put carpeting down on the public stairways. In those flats, there was no petty level of criminality; there were no rent arrears and no yobbing youths setting fire to mattresses in the garages. The community policed itself, and that was because there were people of a wide age range, a wide income span and a wide set of occupations and retirement. Those estates worked, and were the core—the heartbeat—of my city. As Nye Bevan said, they were part of the,
“living tapestry of a mixed community”.
That is what we all want.
I, and perhaps the Minister and other people in this House, have been around the inner-city estates in Detroit, the outskirts of Washington and so on. I saw areas there where, if you get a job, you leave your home; so nobody gets a job except recycling the drugs economy or working on the streets. In these estates, children are in families that are broken and damaged in all sorts of ways; young men go around in groups and gangs, intimidating those who wish to stay. There is a permanent, transient population of the down-and-out, the derelict, the destitute and those with mental health problems. I have been there and seen it: I did not work in it like Obama, but I have spent time there.
If first you have a bedroom tax that forces tenants with larger homes to move because they cannot pay the rent and have to downsize, and disabled people lose their community networks of support; and if secondly you have pay to stay, so that those who could be an aspiration and an inspiration for the young people in the community, who have the knowledge of where jobs may be, and who could help those young people into the labour market, will have moved on; and, if thirdly, on top of that, we are going to have five-year tenancies—and, as my noble friend said, parents who worry would start planning their move with their children in advance, to ensure that their child goes to school—in the process we will strip out the support networks for disabled, older and frail people, and the support networks where people understand the problems that a family with an autistic teenage daughter or son would have. Either they will be sent on their way or they will voluntarily have to move.
Is this what we want? Behind it, as far as I can tell, the thing that is motivating the Government seems to be that council housing is a scarce resource; it is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and therefore, if at all possible, we should move people on and out, irrespective of the damage to the communities, to make way for those on the waiting list who might be in even greater need because we are not building enough social housing for those other people to enjoy.
This is the wrong solution to a description of the wrong problem. We need social housing and stable communities. When it suits the Prime Minister he talks about the value of civic society—I congratulate him when he does so—and of communities on our estates. He talks about the value of the knowledge economy of those in work helping people to come into the labour market. As we know, most jobs do not go through the jobcentre at all but through networks of local knowledge. Strip that out and I promise that you will send those estates spiralling down until in a decade or 20 years you will look at our equivalent of Detroit’s inner city. You will wonder how this happened and what we now do about it.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My noble friend in the first part of her contribution reminded me of the work done by Lewisham Council. In Crofton Park we have the Ewart Road Housing Co-op. That is just the sort of estate that my noble friend talked about at the start. It is a wonderful place that is well run by the tenants. There are people of different ages living there. People have lived there since they were first moved on, there are new people and there is a long waiting list. It is clean, well run and an absolute pleasure to walk round. It is wonderful—and just the sort of place put at risk by the policy we are debating today.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Perhaps I might add one further point. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Young, would agree with my description, but certainly when I was taking Bills through, including the Bills I was responsible for within the department, I had to go to something called “LegCo”—the legislative sub-committee of the Cabinet—where 40 Bills were queuing up for, say, 25 slots in the programme. I would not have been allowed to bring a Bill before this House if I did not know the timetable for the regs and what the import of those regs was, so that I could take the Bill reasonably and appropriately through the stages of this House and my colleagues could do the same down the other end.
Who is failing here? Is it the fact that the Government are so anxious, having won an election, to proceed with legislation when it is not ready? In a previous Government, the Minister would not have been allowed to bring this Bill to either House, and now we are in a position where we cannot scrutinise it as a result of bad management and the failure, in my view, of LegCo, Bill teams and all the rest to do proper scrutiny.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
I endorse the comments of my noble friend Lady Hollis and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, about the inadequate position we find ourselves in. I know that the Minister is frustrated as well but it would be useful if she could tell the House what discussions are going on in the department. This is absolutely ridiculous now. I am no expert in procedure but this is definitely a Bill that should be paused. It is ridiculous. To be told that we will get stuff months and months in the future is just not good enough.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Hollis was absolutely right when she suggested that the only restriction is age. But government Amendments 44A and 44B in this group of course seek powers to disapply even that.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
It would be really helpful if the Minister could assure the House—we really do need this—that proposed draft regulations will be before this House before we get to Report. If not, we will have major problems in this and other areas. It is not too much to ask. The Bill started in the other place last autumn, so there has been abundant time for the Government to determine what their policy intent is behind these “anything goes” powers for the Secretary of State. We must know, otherwise some of us will seek the House’s authority to defer consideration until we have those regulations. We cannot do our job of scrutiny when so much of the information that we need is absent.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
We all want people who work hard to move up the housing ladder, but the problem here is that this is such a small group of people.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Can the Minister explain something? I think most of us would sympathise with trying to find the best way to help people into owner-occupation, particularly given the pressure of house prices. We could argue whether it should be equity loans, starter home discounts of 20% or anything else, but why this sudden fixation with mobility for people who are no longer first-time buyers but second-time buyers and maybe, subsequently, third-time buyers to be free of any discount so that they can enter the market without having had to save, as my noble friend said, in the way that everybody else has? Why do the Government consider it to be part of their responsibility to help people become second-time buyers?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, housing is an issue for government and there is a huge demand on housing in this country. This scheme is not to the exclusion of other products—I must stress that it is not as though we have switched off the tap to all other products. Sitting on these Benches, one might think that there were no other products on the market, but there are. This is one way of helping that demographic for whom home ownership has been so out of reach.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, I am fully in support of both these amendments. I agree with virtually all the contributions that have been made by noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, very eloquently—certainly more eloquently than I could—set out why the Government should accept these amendments, or at least reflect on them carefully and possibly bring back their own amendments on Report. We on these Benches are very supportive of the point that he made about localism. Obviously the exception sites policy is very important, and to lose this opportunity would be very regrettable for the rural areas. That is why in perpetuity is so important.
We have all heard about keeping rural communities alive and thriving, with people of different ages and occupations, or none, all coming together to build a community. What we do not want to see, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, explained, is a group of 60-plus people living there, with no other services. That is the route to that community dying and not being sustainable at all.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I also support these amendments. As a child and as a teenager, I was brought up in a village in south Devon of what we used to call “150 souls”. For some time in the 1970s and 1980s I was a parliamentary candidate in a constituency with a large number of rural villages. As we went round from village to village, there were half a dozen council houses here and half a dozen there—hopefully and usually, but not always, having Labour stickers in their windows. Every one of them has gone. What is left are housing association villages. Obviously housing associations are on a voluntary basis but, as the noble Baroness will know, we are going to have a somewhat similar debate over the problems of rural exception sites with right to buy. There will then be the question of whether there is a portable discount, as opposed to the sale of those particular houses, because government recognises that stripping out affordable rented housing from villages or ensuring that new housing is not of that sort will kill those villages.
It is worth reminding ourselves of how poor, how low and how modest some incomes are in such areas. In much of the parts of rural Norfolk that are not occupied by retirees from Essex, by second home owners from Islington or by reasonably new purchasers on the outskirts of Norwich, incomes are exceedingly low. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, many of the people connected to the agricultural and food processing industries, some manual public sector and building and construction workers—and they are mostly men here—will be lucky if they are taking home £20,000 a year before tax. What about their wives and partners? I was checking when we were doing amendments on previous Bills and found that women in those situations, because they did not have a car, were dependent on their locality and were lucky to piece together an income of £5,000 a year. From what? They cleaned caravans, boats and houses. They picked mushrooms and, occasionally, in summer, they might pick fruit. They amplified that with bar work in the local pub on a weekend. If they could take home £5,000 or £6,000 in total in the course of the year, they regarded themselves as fortunate.
Such people will never buy. What they would like to do is to enjoy an attractive home in which they can keep their roots; where the children can go to the local schools and all of the community virtues, values and emphases that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron and the noble Lord, Deben, have expressed so well are continued. The Government seem to have a conflict of issues here. I am sure that they respect and support the need for communities—particularly viable communities—in more rural areas. The Government also support the philanthropy of landowners, as we all do. At the same time, the Government are also calling for social mobility—for people who actually want to stay, put down roots and make their community thrive. This is inconsistent with the philosophy of starter homes, where you keep your discounts, sell on and make those houses unaffordable to the local community, but you are none the less allowed to buy your next home up the ladder.
I think the Government have to accept that small rural communities are different from the cities, where you have a choice of housing, a choice of occupation and can, to some extent, construct your income. If the Minister does not understand—which I am sure she does—the physical and social immobility and, to some extent, the mental immobility by virtue of family connection, then those villages will die. Certainly, in Norfolk, they are already dying. If all new developments are increasingly monopolised by starter homes and we find, as a result, landowners drying up their donations, particularly to housing associations, then this Government will have the honour of seeing the death of so many of our villages.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, I am conscious of the time. The amendment, tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Beecham, seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to produce an infrastructure plan to be implemented as part of the starter homes programme. This is only a probing amendment but it is particularly relevant to the larger brownfield sites where new housing developments are taking place. We cannot just build a group of houses and have no plans to address the services that are required to make the scheme viable. Those services include access to health services, doctors’ surgeries, dentists, schools, shops and transport including bus services—I am not even going to mention rail services. They are all important and need to be taken into account on these brownfield sites.
Amendment 51 in this group seeks to improve the quality of the information that is to be provided under Clause 5. I beg to move.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I support my noble friend in his Amendment 50F. If we do not do what my noble friend says and ensure that infrastructure and community support are built alongside housing, we will not be building communities, we will be building estates—and many of us know what that problem has meant. Back in the 1950s, Plymouth City Council built estates. It did not build the infrastructure to go along with the housing: community centres, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies, shops and the like. As a result of things like the Essex Design Guide, steered in part I suspect by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in the 1980s, local authorities were encouraged when building developments—in the case of Norwich it was the Bowthorpe estate with something like 15,000 people on it—to build the infrastructure in with the first homes. This included not only shops, community halls, chapels and churches, and of course bus routes and so on, but also small units for industrial use to try to develop to some extent a self-sustaining community.
Within those developments half of the properties went to social housing and half went for sale. In Norwich we could not get builders to build or building societies to lend, so I went to Companies House and got a company from the books in order to make sure that we had a balanced community. To my delight, once when I was in one of the leading stores in Norwich, I heard someone say to someone else, “I see you’ve bought one of those new houses up at Bowthorpe. What’s it like?”. She said, “Oh, it’s very nice with lots of support and amenities. There’s only one thing wrong with it. You can’t tell the difference between my home and a council house”. That was exactly the compliment I wanted to hear.
What we learned from that development and from the Essex Design Guide, which stressed respect for the local environment, was that if you do not put in the infrastructure along with the housing, what you get are soulless estates that are empty during the day and problematic at night. It is deeply important that any developer or local authority which is seeking to develop extensive sites for starter homes should take this into account. I am sure that the Minister knows very well indeed, given her local authority background, that if you do not, you will be building a problem estate from the day you begin.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Doing some quick mental arithmetic, I suspect that we are talking about four to five instances per housing authority per year; compared to the responsibilities of local authorities for fitness standards, inspection of houses in multiple occupation, electrical safety and the like, this is trivial. As an ex-local authority person myself, I absolutely understand why the noble Lord is concerned, but we are dealing with a very small number, and probably the same landlords who are already well-known to local authority housing officers or environmental health officers as being too often on the wrong side of the law.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
I am not a leader of a local authority, but I am a member of one, so I understand the noble Lord’s point. I am not a fan of the Bill, but this part has some very good things in it on strengthening protection for private tenants. By this one provision, we are opening the back door for the rogues. Good landlords would not get involved in this, but there are always the few people who see a quick way to pull a stroke, and we seem to be opening the back door for them as we shut all the other doors. That is odd. The amendment may not be right—it is only a probing amendment—but it highlights a real issue.
Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I apologise to the noble Earl. As I am so anxious to persuade him to agree with me, I will happily take extra time in spelling out the acronyms.
If indeed housing benefit is the issue—because an increase in rent of £5 would be covered by housing benefit—I put it to the Government that any increase in rent above the target rent for such purposes should not be covered by housing benefit, quite simply. That way the housing benefit bill to the Government would be protected and the tenant could choose whether to proceed with solar panels by way of co-payment. If the tenant did so choose, the tenant would enjoy reduced fuel bills and contribute to lower energy consumption in this country. The choice would be with the tenant, there would be no additional cost to the Government, but the reduction in conventional energy and the substitution of green renewable energy would be a gain to us all. I beg to move.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lady Hollis is most interesting and has considerable merit. She has considerable experience in the local government and social housing sectors. Where tenants want to make major improvements or improve other amenities, I can see the case for this being financed by an increase in the rent paid on the property. My noble friend makes compelling points in particular regarding fuel poverty and green energy and also dealing with the issue of housing benefit. If the Government are not able to accept the amendment, will the noble Lord at least agree to take it away and reflect on it? It could be explored further and perhaps introduced at another time following discussion with relevant departments.