Affordable Housing

Lord Suri Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Suri (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for his work in securing the time for this debate. I think that there is a new consensus in British politics. We all agree that house prices are far too high and that home ownership is completely beyond the reach of younger generations.

To be clear, there are real benefits to renting—people can move around more easily and diversify the assets they hold—but it can be only a phase, rather than a permanent destination. Renting indefinitely with no scope to raise the deposit required is a miserable state to be in and saps the vitality of the employment market.

Home ownership improves the stewardship of not just homes, but public places, as people have a real and tangible stake in the community they live in. Sky-high rents also prevent people moving to the parts of the country that they would be most productive in. While the evidence is mixed as to the agglomeration benefits of British cities, cities such as Oxford, York, London and Bristol substantially increase the productivity of those who go to work there. But the lack of affordable homes for sale or rent saps the ability of young people to move.

The reasons for this are quite plain. Our efforts to improve affordability have failed and might be doing damage to the overall cause. The benefits of Help to Buy have disproportionately gone towards housebuilders, who can raise prices knowing that their customers have an additional revenue source. In this country we have tinkered at the edges of a demand-side policy without addressing the real problem, which is a lack of supply.

As the draft analysis of the Letwin report says quite clearly, there is no evidence that developers try to “lock up” land from the market before they seek final planning permissions. The key problem is the lack of available land. It has been a mantra of the nimby tendency to repeat that brownfield land can solve our issues, but there simply is not enough left in our major cities to meet demand and increase supply to reduce prices to an affordable level. If developers do hoard land to maintain prices at unsustainable levels, there is a good justification for intervention by taxing the unused land at a high and escalating level.

The metropolitan green belt was a sensible idea when it first arose. Trying to prevent urban sprawl made sense and industrial urban centres were seen as something to be contained. But cities now host relatively little manufacturing and require homes within commutable distance for employees who work in service industries. Those of us who commute past Battersea power station will appreciate how mixed residential and office spaces can revive an area.

The policy has now been hijacked by an array of special interests that have a primary aim of trying to keep house prices high. In the south-east, the main complaint is that developments will be poorly planned, with no heed for infrastructure upgrades. This is patently wrong. New towns built in the post-war era are some of the most pleasant and well-served places in the country, even if they do have too many mini-roundabouts.

The land for New York’s Central Park was earmarked before the urban city grew out to meet it, due to good planning. Applying an assumption of favourability to planning applications in the green belt would end the choke that they put on truly affordable housing.

Religious Intolerance and Prejudice

Lord Suri Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Suri (Con)]

My Lords, we are all fortunate to live in a country that is relatively far less prone to religious intolerance and injustice than many of our peers. In Europe we compare favourably to our neighbours and we have cultivated a strong global position as a pluralistic and multicultural nation. When I first came to this country as an immigrant, I knew that I was coming to the country which had passed race relations Acts and celebrated the Notting Hill carnival. I worked hard when I first arrived to set up forums and spaces for interfaith understanding and reconciliation, and this country has increasingly accommodated the needs of minority groups. Today, I am proud that more of our public buildings have prayer rooms, and that we enjoy the right to express our beliefs. We should rightly champion all of these achievements, but there is a rot in our society. Two awful prejudices have started to creep back into mainstream discourse, and they must be stamped out before they get worse.

I will start with Islamophobia. Hatred of Muslims is nothing new, but under the new leadership of UKIP, there appears to be a renewed attempt to push it into the mainstream. Tommy Robinson has repeatedly called for actual violence against Muslims, but when he is invited on to news programmes he is not challenged hard enough on his past statements. Giving racists a platform on respectable channels legitimises their points of view and helps them spread their hatred through the internet. The places where racists organise now are mainly online, and I have seen barely any effort from large social media companies to address their obligations to society to shut these spaces down.

These companies kid themselves if they think the pressure is just from politicians. Ordinary people are growing increasingly frustrated with what they see as foot-dragging and shirking of responsibilities. If social media companies committed to working with the DCMS to police spaces where hatred is rampant, it might go some way to addressing those concerns.

Across the hard left, anti-Semitism also seems to be making a comeback. Labour’s summer of denying the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism gave succour to extremists who would use the actions of the Israeli state to attack and demonise British Jews who have no part in the conflict in the Middle East. Sadly, the leader of the Opposition in the other place has a long history of these statements. Repeatedly, he has blamed Israel for events that are not directly attributable to it, and has long associated with those who have made anti-Semitic comments. His comment that some British Zionists did not understand English irony despite,

“having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives”,

was worrying and ought to be condemned by all right-thinking people. There is nothing wrong with criticism of Israel’s actions, and a robust debate is part of a healthy civic society; but the tone and actions of the Labour leadership have created a climate of fear for British Jews. Many Members, both here and in the other place, have made this point. I despair that the Labour leadership are not listening, or that they might not even care, but they should. Anti-Semitism is the first of many evils in society, and Jews are the canary in the coalmine for waves of incoming prejudice. We dismiss concerns at our peril.

I urge Ministers to make it clear that all types of crime—hate crimes and others—against Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and other faiths must be stopped. Human beings are the image of our maker. They should be respected and not hated. As the most reverend Primate said, love thy neighbour.

Sant Kabir was born in India near the holy river Ganga. As a newly-born baby, he was left at a pond. Nobody knew who his parents were. He was picked up by a Muslim weaver. As he grew up with him, he became a saintly person, because the holy river Ganga is in the holy city of Varanasi. His sayings are included in the holy books of Siri Guru Granth Sahib, so we can see what the difference means—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian.

A Muslim, a Hindu or a Sikh—they are all the same; there is no difference. Kabir believed in one God and other people the same. As I have said, his sayings are included in Guru Granth Sahib. We should practise that method: that we are all children of God; there is nobody bad and nobody good. They are all the same.

EU: Energy Governance (EUC Report)

Lord Suri Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Suri (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for bringing forward this debate. The report is timely given that we have only a little more than a week to go until the most critical poll that probably any of us will know in our lifetime. I hope that the British people, with their infinite sensibility, will opt for the safer choice rather than retreating from the world and the globalisation that has made us all richer, safer and more harmonious.

The report touches on one of the most pressing and serious issues that we face, not just us as Britons but as humanity. Climate change mitigation cannot be settled at national level. Greenhouse gases and rising sea levels do not respect national borders, and we and our European allies sensibly use the EU as a forum to decide what action to take.

As it happens, I support the EU proposal that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by at least 40% from 1990 levels by 2030 and by 80% to 95% by 2050. We have the Climate Change Act to compel the Secretary of State to work towards this target, too, but it is useful to have similar controls in the 2009 renewable energy directive. I am glad to see that the authors of this report endorse that responsibility.

It is important, however, to take account of the geopolitical nature of energy policy. As the report says, one can draw a perhaps depressing comparison between Germany and Poland. While Germany has the luxury of not being overly dependent on coal or Russian fuels, Poland is heavily dependent on both. It would be unfair to Poland and other Visegrád countries to expect full implementation of all the relevant directives and regulations. Indeed, it would be a good idea to attempt to reform this peculiarity in the next reform agenda. Preferably, this would happen during the upcoming UK presidency of the Council.

Another salient point raised pertains to the integration of the market with regard to capacity market designs. Much like climate mitigation, EU member states are deeply interdependent when it comes to interconnectors. With a wide range of capacity market designs, the relevant authorities, on both the national and European level, run into difficulties. Power systems can become overloaded if supply is insufficient to meet demand in particular localities. Given that the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has warned about the danger of concurrent overloads, action is required on the European level to remedy this. There are other benefits beyond just keeping the lights on, as investment markets can be calmed by increased security, thereby ensuring price stability. In the light of this, I look forward to seeing the Commission bring forward proposals in the area of market design and regulation in 2016.

To touch on a final topic, I feel that one of the problems the British public have with the EU and the institutions is that they feel overly bureaucratic and inefficient. Earlier, I mentioned the importance of oversight in the legal requirements for member states. There will of course need to be some authority tasked with this. I recommend that a new institution is not necessary. The Eurosceptics in European Union countries would have a clear case to make about the wasting of public money. The European Environment Agency could easily deal with a broadened oversight remit or the Commission could deal with it itself. But setting up a new institution, with a new building, more civil servants and its own acronym, would just hand more ammunition to those who are chipping away at European solidarity and co-operation.