Affordable Housing

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. The last time I looked at the figures for construction, conversion and demolition, I found that the average house in this country has to last 2,000 years. In the mid-1980s, when the national federation published the Duke of Edinburgh’s report on housing, the same calculation produced a figure of 800 years—that is the difference. I will concentrate today on the points made by Shelter. There is no sense in going over the problems; I want to concentrate on the solutions put forward by Shelter, and I will touch on some of them.

The first is the restoration of the affordable housing programme, cut by 60% in 2011 when the funding for social rent was completely removed. We also have to start to use our brains. I was on the original Standing Committee in the Commons when rent allowances became housing benefit. We warned at the time of the possibility that this subsidy to private landlords would get out of hand—it is now £24 billion. Look at the Guardian: four pages today and yesterday on the housing benefits scam for private landlords. Some of that should come back into creating social housing.

We have a housing team in the department, which I fully accept and back. But I hope that the Government have grown up. Nick Clegg said that he could not remember whether it was David Cameron or George Osborne who said:

“I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for social housing—it just creates Labour voters”.


That was reported in the Independent on 3 September 2016, and it is not a grown-up way of looking at public policy. Given the fact that the Tories got 44% of C2DEs at the last election and Labour got 42%, the calculation and assessment does not apply anymore anyway.

Back to Shelter. Greater CPO powers for land to come into development has been touched on. The legislation could be put in the Queen’s Speech, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Horam, said, it is in all the parties’ manifestos—there is no division between us on this, and some serious action should be taken. The land value scam is crucial.

The third point Shelter made is that we need to get a central grip on this. I know that everybody says that it should be done from the bottom up and be community based—I worked with John Prescott for three years to get community planning right. But there has to be some drive in Whitehall at the top, because civil servants and Ministers come and go. You have to have a drive forward at the top, without micromanaging locally. Therefore, Shelter wants to establish development corporations that are powerful and able to assist and assemble a master plan for land, because you have to deal with CPO powers as well and act as master planners. Closing planning loopholes and the viability loophole are pretty crucial as well. Permitted development rights are really a bit of a scam that should be dealt with.

I have a suggestion. Back in 1997-98, when new Labour came into power—I am quite proud of new Labour by the way; my current leadership is not but I am—my noble friend Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, who was Housing Minister at the time, was lobbied by various bodies including Shelter about what to do about rough sleeping. So she said to Louise Casey of Shelter, “Okay, come into government and fix it”. The legacy of the plan put by Louise Casey, which I inherited for a couple of years as Housing Minister, was that by 2010 we had virtually eliminated rough sleeping in this country. All the statistics show that. So my suggestion to the Government is to think big. Go back to Shelter and say, “If you’ve got a plan and you’ve got solutions, why doesn’t one of you come in and help drive this forward?”.