Housing Market

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this important and timely debate and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, on leading it. I also greatly congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, on her maiden speech, which showed us what we need and what we are missing. I liked a lot of what she had to say about the fact that it is communities and not just buildings we are talking about here. I must say that I had not heard Lord Silkin’s inspiring words before she said them at the end of her speech.

I am coming at this from the perspective of quality rather than numbers—quality and health. I suspect that I am probably the least knowledgeable person about housing in this debate. I have come to it rather late, after realising something I should have realised long ago about the extraordinary interconnections between health and housing and how absolutely fundamental they are. A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, have made the point that housing is a foundation for people’s lives. I think he said something about how many of our social and economic problems stem from poor housing within our society. I absolutely agree with that.

I have been gradually learning about housing and have been astonished to understand what major problems there are right across the entire system, from the inability to build the numbers that we say we are going to build, to questions of quality of construction and repairs and questions of planning. Within all that, there are some obvious health issues. I refer briefly to the tragic story of the young child in Rochdale who died very recently from mould in completely inadequate housing. I refer also to how, during Covid, we know that things such as lack of ventilation and overcrowding affected the lives of many, sometimes with fatal consequences. There are something like 2 million older households living in poor housing. As has already been said by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, the NHS faces massive costs because of poor housing: one estimate is at least £1.4 billion annually. Of that, 60% was due to cold and around 30% to falls—two things that are preventable, but neither of which it looks as if in the near future we will see much improvement in. Of course, there are other issues here about independent living.

There are extraordinary interconnections between poor housing—which is what we are talking about—and health, and it is vital to get both right. This has a long history; indeed, the first Minister of Health was also a Minister of Housing. I am not going to suggest to the current Secretary of State that he may wish to add that to his other duties at the moment but, somewhere, the close connection between housing and health has got lost. This is a very clear example of why we need the sort of strategy that the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, is proposing, which looks at it in the context of wider social, economic and environmental issues. I have been talking about health, but somebody else in this debate could equally stand up and talk about the environmental impact of poor housing and the fact that so much carbon is used, not just in the construction but on a continuing basis. I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, who commented on how much finance would be needed in Stevenage to bring houses up to the required standard.

So there is a clear need for a new strategy that takes a really comprehensive view. As part of that, we obviously need to get regulation right. I am in fact not a great fan of regulation, having run teaching hospitals in Oxford and been very aware that ill-thought-through regulation can be extraordinarily damaging. But there is a need for less—in some ways—but smarter regulation here. I have heard plenty of examples—and we have just heard them again from the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours—of where regulation does not cover the entire field, where there is conflict between different sets of regulations, or where there are policy conflicts. I am aware myself of policy conflicts where it is very difficult to get through planning some of the obvious things that are needed to improve environmental issues. There is a whole range of conflicts here.

However, I was surprised to discover, when I talked to the chief executive of one of the major housing developers, which produces very high-quality houses, about regulation—which obviously he did not particularly want—the point he made was that there is nobody who checks up on the regulation. This, I guess, must be known well to other people in the Chamber, but the surprising point that he was making is that there is a lot of regulation but not very much in the way of inspection. Local authorities and others have lost a lot of the staff who would otherwise be making sure that regulation was properly applied. The implication he left me with was that good developers of course pay attention to the regulations, but many others do not.

So there seem to be some major problems in the way regulation is handled at the moment. What are the levers that this Government are going to use, perhaps including regulation but maybe including codes of good practice or incentives? How will they ensure that in future we will not see more poor-quality homes being built? Because we are seeing poor-quality homes being built, partly through permitted development rights but also through other routes. How can the Government ensure that we stop the problem getting worse, let alone move forward to improve things?

We need a comprehensive strategy that covers social, economic and environmental aspects. There is plenty of expertise around. There are plenty of reports. My noble friend Lord Best spelled out the importance of Sir Oliver Letwin’s report of some years ago now and how it pointed to an essential problem underlying all of this. So, there is an enormous amount of expertise and we also need a clear vision of what this or any future Government seek to do with their housing strategy. While I and others have been talking about all the negative impacts of poor housing and poor maintenance and the impact they have on people, there is also a positive aspect here. It takes us back, of course, to the new towns and garden cities, to Port Sunlight and other aspects of past developments when people saw and understood that housing as part of the development of cities and towns is about enhancing life, about the ability to provide a foundation for people’s lives so they can thrive, and about their health and well-being, as well as everything else.

I will end on two final points. One is that we need to start to think about this in positive terms, addressing the problems but actually setting out a strategy that builds something that is positive for the future and sees this as the foundation of people’s lives and their ability to thrive, as well as being essential for their health and well-being. We cannot expect the nation to prosper successfully if we treat people’s homes in the way we are doing at the moment. I return to my final question. How will this Government ensure that there are no more poor-quality homes being built?