Asked by: Austin Mitchell (Labour - Great Grimsby)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, if he will take steps to create more affordable housing in London.
Answered by Brandon Lewis
Decentralisation
The Coalition Government decentralised housing, regeneration and economic development to the Mayor of London from April 2012. This enables him to shape programmes and direct funding to meet London’s needs.
As part of the transfer of housing and regeneration functions we provided a capital grant of around £2.6 billion to the Greater London Authority up to 2014-15 to fund the housing and regeneration programmes inherited from the Homes and Communities Agency, the London Development Agency and for the development of the Olympic Park.
Budget measures
Our commitment to support London was set out in the recent Budget, where the Government set out the following proposals for London:
Affordable housing investment
Government funding for new affordable housing in London is as follows: 2010-11: £1.1 billion (outturn), 2011-12: £712 million (outturn), 2012-13: £400 million (budget), 2013-14: £392 million (budget); 2014-15: £516 million (budget). However, this understates the total expenditure on new affordable housing in this Parliament. Across England, our affordable housing programme in 2011-15 is delivering £19.5 billion of public and private investment in affordable housing; about a quarter of which is being provided in London.
This investment continues to contribute to the provision of new affordable homes for Londoners, of which 51,300 had already been delivered in London between April 2010 and the end of September 2014.
A further £1.07 billion has been allocated from the 2015-18 Affordable Homes Programme, to deliver another 32,000 new affordable homes in London. In addition a further £180 million has been allocated from the Affordable Homes Guarantee Programme to deliver 8,700 homes. The Greater London Authority has so far announced initial grant allocations of £404 million to deliver 18,000 new homes and are now inviting further bids on a continuous market engagement basis. Again, the grant funding understates the total anticipated expenditure on affordable housing. We will deliver a total of 275,000 new affordable homes across England in 2015-20, with £38 billion of public and private investment. London’s allocation for 2018-20 has not been finalised.
Building more rented accommodation
The London Housing Bank is a new housing fund intended as a springboard to home ownership for aspirational working households on lower incomes. Through London Housing Bank, we are providing the Greater London Authority with £200 million of low-cost loan funding to deliver 3,000 – 4,000 new homes by March 2018.
The Greater London Authority has already announced the first allocations of funding from the London Housing Bank, which will help deliver intermediate rental homes. These schemes include: Peabody Homes in Thamesmead; Isis part of the wider Hale Wharf regeneration site; and Quintain part of the continued regeneration of Wembley Park.
Under our £1 billion Build to Rent fund we have contracted 4 schemes in London worth over £63 million and delivering 671 homes for private rent.
Improving social housing
We have awarded Decent Homes Backlog Funding of £821 million to 14 London Boroughs. This funding has so far made 42,110 homes decent. Gap funding granted to stock transfer landlords of £24 million has helped ensure that less than 0.9% of their stock failed the Decent Homes Standard at the end of March 2014.
A further £145 million has been awarded to 9 London Boroughs to tackle their remaining Decent Homes Backlog. This will help to ensure that no more than 10% of stock in each local authority is non-decent by April 2016.
We have also taken steps to protect leaseholders from excessive works charges imposed by local authorities.
Reducing empty housing
We have provided the Greater London Authority with £29 million to bring 1,600 empty homes back into use as affordable housing. Our full package of reforms to tackle empty housing is outlined in the written answer of 17 March 2015, Question 227326.
London Boroughs have been allocated a total of £720 million of New Homes Bonus funding for 2011-2016, recognising over 140,000 additions to stock, and over 15,000 long-term empty properties returned to use. Almost 50,000 of these also received the premium for affordable homes.
Supporting self-build and custom build
In July 2012 we launched the Custom Build Homes Loan Fund and we delegated £5 million to the Greater London Authority to administer schemes in London. Bids exceeding this were submitted to the Greater London Authority and £4.8 million was allocated. We have exempted self-builders from Community Infrastructure Levy and Section 106 tariffs.
Promoting home ownership schemes
Since the start of the Help to Buy scheme in March 2012, over 5,300 families across London have brought a home using the support of a Government loan or guarantee, of which over 4,200 sales were to first-time buyers. This includes 2,430 under the Equity Loan sales scheme (of which 2,304 were to first-time buyers), 2,175 under the Mortgage Guarantee sales (of which 1,955 to first-time buyers) and 721 Newbuy sales (data is not available for the number of first-time buyers).
We have reinvigorated the Right to Buy, with a proportion of the sales receipts being used to build new housing. This increases housing supply, moves people up the housing ladder and gets people off waiting lists.
Supporting locally-led regeneration schemes
We, with the Mayor, are investing each investing £200 million to create 20 new Housing Zones which will deliver 50,000 homes in London. The Mayor announced the first eleven Housing Zones in London in February 2015.
We are working with the Greater London Authority and Transport for London to unlock 11,000 homes at Barking Riverside.
We have invested around £125 million through Get Britain Building for twenty two schemes which has resulted in starts for 3,000 homes. The schemes include:
Brentford Locks West – Get Britain Building funding enabled the first phase of this mixed use scheme by Isis Waterside Development to be delivered, bringing forward the first three blocks which deliver a total of 150 homes.
Grahame Park, Brent – Get Britain Building funding unlocked a phase of this major regeneration scheme that had stalled. The first block of homes was completed in March 2014 with the final homes due to complete in March 2015.
Lewisham Gateway - Get Britain Building funding will deliver 193 units and indirectly support the delivery of an additional 701 homes.
We have shortlisted four housing estates in London for a share of a £150 million Government loan fund for Estate Regeneration. These schemes are in Grahame Park, in Barnet; Blackwall Reach and New Union Wharf, in Tower Hamlets and Aylesbury Estate, in Southwark. They would provide more than 8,000 new homes, of which more than 3,000 would be additional homes
The Government announced in 2012 a UK Guarantee which would allow the Mayor of London to borrow £1 billion at a new preferential rate from the Public Works Loan Board to support the Northern Line Extension. We have aslo recently made regulations allowing the retention of 100% of business rates growth in the area from which to fund the borrowing. The extension is critical to the realisation of the £8 billion Battersea Power Station redevelopment, as well as the wider regeneration of the Vauxhall and Nine Elms area.
Surplus Public Sector Land capable of delivering almost 28,000 homes has been sold in London. This was critical towards helping us achieve our wider ambition to dispose of land for 100,000 homes across England by the end of March 2015.
We have supported a number of other regeneration projects in London. These include:
Tackling homelessness and rough sleeping
We have supported the Mayor in tackling homelessness in London through:
In addition we have provided £167 million Homelessness Prevention Grant to local authorities in London to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping.
There is more to do, but I hope this illustrates the decision action taken by this Government to build more affordable homes and help people move on and up the housing ladder.
Asked by: Austin Mitchell (Labour - Great Grimsby)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what support is available to councils and housing associations to (a) modernise and (b) demolish tower blocks; and what guidance his Department provides to local authorities on tower blocks.
Answered by Brandon Lewis
We have invested more than £2 billion to enable council and housing association homes to be brought up to the Decent Homes standard, and have announced a £150 million funding pot to enable the regeneration of some of our most run-down estates.
Reforms we have introduced have given councils greater freedoms, including the retention of their full rental income. All 167 council landlords in England now have a long-term, stable source of funding, which they can use to better meet the needs of their tenants and local area, and have, on average, 15% more to spend on managing and maintaining their homes than under the previous system.
While we recognise that transformational estate regeneration may require some demolition of existing homes, this will need to be clearly justified. We would expect landlords to first consider options to upgrade and refurbish existing homes, in consultation with residents, in line with George Clarke’s 12 point plan (http://georgeclarke.com/2012/11/george-clarkes-empty-homes-manifesto-delivered-to-government-today/).
It is of course important that any modernisation, regeneration or demolition takes place only once the views of the local community have been taken into account.
I also refer the hon. Member to the Written Ministerial Statement of 16 January 2015, Official Report, Column 35-37WS, which outlines what this Government has done to promote refurbishment and getting empty building back into use.
Asked by: Austin Mitchell (Labour - Great Grimsby)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how many houses have been built under the Government's proposal to replace every house sold under its right to buy arrangements; and how many houses have been sold under those arrangements.
Answered by Brandon Lewis
This Government have committed to re-invest, for the first time ever, the additional receipts from Right to Buy sales in new affordable rented housing. Our aim, across England as a whole, is to deliver a new home for each additional home sold under the reinvigorated Right to Buy.
The one-for-one replacement policy applies to additional local authority sales, that is sales above the level forecast before the reinvigoration of the policy in April 2012. Since the reinvigoration, local authorities have sold 14,700 additional sales, and over 4,795 dwellings have already been started on site or acquired.
There will be a time lag between the Right to Buy sale, and the planning and construction of the new build home, but the replacement timetable is in control of the local authority. If a council were to fail to spend the receipts within three years, it would be required to return the unspent money to Government with interest. This provides a strong financial incentive for any slow-coach councils to use this new funding and get on with building more homes for local people.
Since 2010, a total of 217,000 new affordable homes have been delivered in England. Council house building is now at a 23 year high; almost twice as much council housing has been built under this Government, than in all of the 13 years combined of the last Labour Government.
Asked by: Austin Mitchell (Labour - Great Grimsby)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, if he will increase the number of council tax bands to increase the proportion of their income wealthiest people pay as council tax.
Answered by Kris Hopkins
We have no intention of introducing higher council tax bands.
Council tax re-banding would require a wholesale council tax revaluation, hitting ordinary home owners with higher taxes, especially those who have undertaken home improvements. Fundamentally, council tax is not a wealth tax; it is a local charge for the use of local services. The current banded system is intentionally designed to avoid the flaws and inequities of both the poll tax and of domestic rates, the former which taxed multiple-adult homes too much, and the latter which taxed both family homes and pensioner households too much. Both were scrapped for good reason.
I would note that the last Labour Government and Welsh Assembly Government jointly undertook a council tax revaluation and re-banding exercise in Wales in 2005. Four times as many homes moved up one or more bands than moved down. Two-thirds of the net rises were among homes (originally) in Bands A to C, meaning that those on more modest incomes were hardest hit.
Labour Ministers originally claimed that revaluation was revenue-neutral, but this was not the case. In the first year of the revaluation, council tax income rose by 10%, of which 4% was due to that year's increase in Band D rates, and 6% due to more properties in higher bands due to the revaluation (Welsh Assembly Government, Submission to the Lyons Inquiry into Local Government, Annex B: Council Tax Revaluation and Rebanding 2005, Chronology and Facts, March 2006). To place that in context, a 6% rise in council tax receipts in England would today represent a sustained tax increase on hard-working people of £1.4 billion a year, every year.
As the then Chairman of the Communities and Local Government Select Committee, Phyllis Starkey (the then Labour Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes South West), observed: “The Welsh Assembly – I believe it was my party, but I am not making an excuse for it - took advantage of the revaluation hugely to increase the total [tax] take” (3 February 2010, Official Report, column 383).
This Government has already taken a number of steps to tackle property tax avoidance by a small minority.
Instead of finding new ways to tax people, this Government have given extra funding to town halls to help freeze council tax. A further council tax freeze is available to councils next year. We have handed local residents new rights to veto big local tax hikes, so local people have the final say on the amount they pay.
Council tax in England more than doubled under the Labour Government; under this Government, bills have fallen by 11% in real terms, giving families financial security and helping hard-working people with the cost of living.
Asked by: Austin Mitchell (Labour - Great Grimsby)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how many contracts signed by his Department with suppliers of services or consultants include a clause providing that if the contract is abrogated by the Government, the provider or consultant will be compensated for lost income since 2010.
Answered by Kris Hopkins
There have been no contracts signed by my Department since 2010 which have been cancelled with such a clause attached to the contract.