Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (Business Rate Supplements Functions) Order 2018

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I again remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I welcome these orders. I am a firm believer in voluntary taxation, and the system used in this case with the business rate supplement is similar to that used for business improvement districts. In that respect, it is a procedure that can command public support: if the business rate payers involved do not want to pay the money they have the right to reject it in a ballot. There is therefore a democratic process, which is very helpful.

On average, around 90% of business rate payers under any of these four orders will not be paying any additional money. Around 10% in Cambridge and 14% in Peterborough will have to pay a bit more. The Minister kindly read out the total sums of money that could be raised with a 2p in the pound levy. Clearly, rateable values vary. Could the Minister, either now or in writing, tell us the highest amount that might have to be paid by a business rate payer in each of these four areas, given that the threshold is to be a £50,000 valuation but some clearly have a higher valuation than that? Of the £35 million in the West Midlands, say, what is the highest single amount that might have to be paid by a business rate payer?

Overall, I do not think that these orders relate to the overall structure of combined authorities. There have been debates about mayors’ powers and the fact that the scrutiny systems need to be made stronger in combined authorities. Of course, in London an assembly lies behind the mayoral structure, which does not exist for the combined authorities elsewhere in England. All that having been said, the specific process relating to a business rate supplement stands on its own. It seems appropriate and should be supported.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I also draw the attention of the House to the fact that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am generally happy to support the orders before the House, but there is a point to be made about business rates. I accept that this is a supplement and in that sense it could be subject to a referendum, a plan and stuff, but there is the point about business rates in general and what business has to pay in an area. We have many questions here about the cost to business of further taxation. In the West Midlands, for example, if a further £35 million is raised, what does that do to the economy? Is that the best use of that money?

That then comes back to the whole issue of combined authorities. Where they are established, the funding provided by government is relatively small. I am sure the noble Lord will not agree, but I have made the point before to his noble friend Lord Bourne that we have this rather confusing patchwork of local government emerging in England. We need a clear structure that we will get to. I am all in favour of devolution, but I would like to understand what the plan is. Certain places will potentially have four, five or maybe six authorities, whereas in another place there will be just one. That does not seem to be very good government at all. I am all in favour of devolution, but I am not convinced that the combined authority model is the best way forward.

I am happy to support the orders, as I said. I welcome the fact that the supplementary rates will have to be subject to a ballot. That is good news, but generally there is the whole issue of business rates and the effect on businesses, particularly on the high street.

Legislative Reform (Regulator of Social Housing) (England) Order 2018

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Lords Chamber

Today, we are back to the future, with the Homes and Communities Agency dividing into, on the one hand, Homes England—the investment side—helping to get more of the 300,000 new homes built, and, on the other hand, the new Regulator of Social Housing. This will avoid the potential problem of conflicting objectives between the funder, when it has invested in a housing association and wants to get the maximum return, and the regulator, when it may need to discipline, penalise or even close down that same housing association. The new arrangements will remove these tensions. They will allow Homes England to concentrate on the big job of supporting the provision of more, and more affordable, new homes. With a Green Paper on social housing due for publication later this year, they pave the way for the regulatory function to be refined and enhanced. It is surely time for history to repeat itself: the separation of functions, once again, must be right. I support the order.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the Minister for his explanation and the noble Lord, Lord Best, for reminding us of the history of this matter. We support the order to create a stand-alone regulatory authority. It seems a logical and necessary step, given the changed nature of the Homes and Communities Agency, now Homes England, and the potential conflict of interest that could arise if a housing association was in financial difficulty. It should not be a secured creditor of organisations that it regulates, and the regulatory framework should be robust and seen to be robust by third parties and private investors. There is strong public support for the proposals and, as a consequence, these proposals should command our support, too.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my registered interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The order before the House is one I support. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Best, for reminding us of the history of this and of the bonfire of the quangos—I remember the debates we had in the House about that. Clearly, the phoenix has now risen from the fire and we are back where we started. I am very happy with that and with the explanation that the noble Lord has given us. I am happy to support the order.

Building Regulations and Fire Safety: Government Response

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord is quite right: what Dame Judith is basically saying is that we should rely less on looking in isolation at individual elements within the construction industry, which she argues leads to fragmentation, silo thinking and gaming the system, and move towards an outcome-based approach, which means standing back and making sure that the system as a whole has integrity. She is worried that at the moment what she describes as a prescriptive approach means relying on people meeting minimum standards and not taking a broader view of what is going on. In a quote that makes the point, Dame Judith says:

“This is most definitely not just a question of the specification of cladding systems but of an industry that has not reflected and learned for itself, nor looked to other sectors”.


She wants to promote what she calls a proactive and holistic view of the system as a whole. So not only should we look at the oil and gas industries, we should look at what is happening overseas where other countries are also moving towards an outcome-based system. I shall certainly take on board his point about a dialogue with other industries which have moved in this direction.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I may remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I will raise two issues which I do not think have come out fully in our discussions so far. One relates to the fact that in the future, and depending on the consultation, it might be possible for combustible materials to be used on buildings. The Government’s Statement says that people living in buildings such as Grenfell Tower should be safe and should feel safe. But no one who knows that their accommodation is made of combustible materials is going to feel safe, and I suspect that they will also face substantial increases in their insurance premiums. So I hope that we will pay close attention to what the ABI and RIBA are saying about the need to make the use of combustible materials illegal.

My second question concerns the £400 million, because this issue has not yet been made clear. Is this a fixed sum of money which local authorities are to bid into or is it a flexible sum that may actually be higher than £400 million when all the costs of replacing the cladding are known? Further, does it include payment to local housing authorities for the fire watching that is currently being undertaken in a large number of high-rise blocks? It goes on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week and the costs are likely to have substantial implications for the rents paid by those who are in that accommodation. I hope very much that the £400 million is a flexible sum that will include the amount that might be loaded on to people’s rents.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I take the noble Lord’s point about the views of the ABI. Under the recommendations made by Dame Judith, those living in blocks of flats will have much more information about how safe their building is. She talks about a “golden thread”, which is a database relating to the building. It would be kept up to date and would be accessible to residents.

On the £400 million, we want to allocate this funding for remediation as soon as possible and we will announce more details shortly, including how we will encourage landlords to continue to pursue other parties for costs where they are responsible or at fault. He asked whether it is a flexible sum. As someone who was once a Minister in that department and had negotiations with the Treasury, I suspect that it is not a flexible sum: it is £400 million that is available for local authorities to bid for to help them with the costs that they have faced. We are trying to do all we can to ensure that in the social housing sector, the costs of implementing the recommendations do not fall on tenants’ rents. We have made that position clear.

Housing Associations

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Shipley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of reports of the loss of 93,820 housing association homes for social rent between 2012 and 2017.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my entry in the register of interests and beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, the coalition Government secured more social housing by prioritising homes for affordable rent over homes for social rent. This enabled more than 357,000 new affordable homes to be built since 2010. We are providing more than £9 billion of funding for the affordable homes programme to March 2021 and £1 billion housing revenue account borrowing freedom for local authorities. This will support social landlords to build more affordable homes including homes for social rent.

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. He will be aware that the loss of housing association homes for social rent reported at the end of last week reflects in part a move from social rented homes to affordable rents but also the sale of some housing association homes. We have been waiting for the Government’s Green Paper on social housing for many months. When is that Green Paper due? Do the Government actually believe in social housing?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Of course the Government believe in social housing, which is why, as I said in my reply, more than £9 billion has been allocated to it. In the last seven years, more affordable homes have been built than in the last seven years of the last Labour Government. We are committed to more social housing. The Green Paper on social housing is expected in the spring.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, and to have listened to her important observations on equalities and employment rights, and the potential for them to be weakened in this and other Bills. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, on his excellent demolition of a hard Brexit. As he said, a hard Brexit is a minority interest. Indeed it is.

In an earlier contribution, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, said that there is political paralysis caused by Brexit and that the Government need to reduce uncertainty. I agree with him, and I agree with all those business leaders who are urging the Government to start showing some leadership, given that we are half way through the period allowed by the triggering of Article 50. It is staggering that so little has been done and equally staggering that the Cabinet seems incapable of even proposing what it wants from our future trading relationship with the European Union.

Much has been said about the need for frictionless trade with the EU, and I think we are all in favour of that. However, I am prepared to acknowledge that frictionless trade means that we must stay in the single market and the customs union and that, if there are substantial changes to those structures, we will need a transition or implementation period of several years. Two years or less from March 2019 is simply not long enough, given the enormity of the changes that would be required. Anything other than staying in the single market and the customs union will hit investment, jobs and growth. There is already evidence that growth is lower than it could be and that it will go on being so, caused entirely by the uncertainties over investment that Brexit is causing.

That point was made recently by the Governor of the Bank of England, who estimated that Brexit is costing the UK about £200 million a week in lost growth. This is compounded by the fact that there now seems to be some evidence that all the uncertainties are causing the banks to get increasingly nervous about company borrowing levels post Brexit, and they will be looking closely at companies seeking to borrow without having developed a secure post-Brexit business plan. A failure of companies to invest is in no-one’s interest because it will cost growth and jobs.

Exit from the customs union will lead to soaring red tape, with new customs rules and paperwork, as the CBI has pointed out. It will hardly be frictionless. VAT will have to be paid up front. All the major changes will come as a huge shock for tens of thousands of companies that export only to the European Union that currently have frictionless, borderless trade and that have no experience of the paperwork required to export to places other than the European Union. How will those companies understand the required documentation and the rules?

I have heard it said recently that the Government are yet to train the people who will train the staff in the relevant companies. What checks are being made by Ministers on who is doing the necessary preparatory work and what resources are going into it? How many businesses might lose business because they do not know what they should be doing and fall foul of the rules? We should note that the French announced recently that they expect to spend three years training their customs staff.

In a recent report, the National Audit Office said that the Department for International Trade is struggling to develop specialist trade skills among staff and has therefore slowed down its work. Apparently, one of the problems is that staff have moved too often in Whitehall. The failure to deliver trade deals will lead to less growth and fewer jobs, yet the Department for International Trade has had an extra £25 million in the current financial year to prepare for Brexit. What has that been spent on?

I conclude that there is so much uncertainty that the British people have the right to be consulted again on the terms of Brexit, as negotiated. There are two reasons for that. The decision to leave the EU was made in a referendum. Constitutionally, I find it difficult to see why the people should be denied the right to a final say on the exact terms of Brexit once Parliament has debated those proposed terms. I draw the attention of the Minister to the fact that, in recent polls, the majority of the public want a referendum on the final terms. The last one I saw, a few days ago, showed 58% support for a confirmatory referendum. However, importantly, 85% of 18 to 24 year-olds and 74% of 25 to 34 year-olds wanted the right to vote on the final terms. I do not think we can disregard the views of young people, who will have to live with the consequences of Brexit. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, who a few moments ago talked about this issue. As I recall, he said that we have to bear in mind how history will judge harshly those who disregard the views of the young.

Grenfell Tower

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I endorse what the noble Lord said about the response of the fire service—it was on the scene within six minutes—and about the community response. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury paid tribute to and spoke very movingly about that response on the “Today” programme.

To bring the House up to date: 151 homes were lost in the fire; some of those homes were overcrowded and others had multi-generational households which now wish to divide, so 210 households that formerly lived in Grenfell Tower and Grenfell Walk need to be rehoused. One hundred and forty-four households have accepted an offer of either temporary or permanent accommodation; 99 have moved in—54 into temporary housing and 45 into permanent housing—and 111 are in emergency accommodation, of whom 66 are yet to accept an offer of either permanent or temporary accommodation.

The noble Lord asks, quite rightly, what action is being taken. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea plans, by Christmas, to have acquired 300 homes, set against the 210 that are needed. It is acquiring two homes a day. I quite agree that Christmas is no time to spend in emergency accommodation; the Government are acutely aware of that. In the four hotels where most of the families are, specific arrangements have been made for the families to have space of their own to meet each other and to entertain their wider families, if they want to. A lot of services are being put on by voluntary or faith groups over the Christmas period to help and support those families.

We very much hope that by June next year everyone will have moved into permanent accommodation, but families need to move in their own time. Some who are in emergency accommodation do not want to move into temporary accommodation because they might have to move twice. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is doing intensive work alongside the families, finding out what accommodation they need and where they need it, and seeking to match that with the 300 houses that it is acquiring. I very much hope that by June everybody will have been offered and accepted permanent accommodation.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I join the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, in paying my respects to those who died in the Grenfell fire six months ago. I remind the Minister that this Question is about what the Government are doing. Does he accept that local people have now lost confidence in their local council? I remind him that in the Government’s Statement on the Grenfell fire on 19 October, it was said that there were expected to be 300 suitable local permanent properties by Christmas, yet only 45 households have moved in. Does he have confidence in the local council to deliver, or may it be time for the Government to intervene more directly?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The Government have no plans to put commissioners into the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It has a new leader and a new chief executive and the Government have established a task force to make sure that that royal borough lives up to the expectations that everyone has of what it plans to do. Some of those in temporary accommodation want that to become their permanent home. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is approaching the relevant landlords to see whether that can take place. Some of those in emergency accommodation have already accepted permanent accommodation but it takes time to complete, fit out the house and put in the white goods to enable the families to move in. I am conscious that your Lordships are impatient for progress to be made but I am confident that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which plans to spend nearly £250 million acquiring property, now has the message, and I think the former lack of emotional intelligence and empathy is now behind us. It is now getting on with the job.

Universal Credit

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, for enabling us to have this debate and for her forensic examination of the problems of universal credit. This debate is important for two reasons: first, the evidence is now conclusive that there is a major problem with the rollout of universal credit and, secondly, there is an opportunity for the Chancellor to do something about it in the Budget next week.

The evidence shows that the way universal credit is working is forcing more and more poor people into rent arrears and into greater use of food banks. The Trussell Trust has demonstrated that in those areas where universal credit has been introduced, the use of food banks has increased by nearly one-third compared with just over 10% in those places it has not been introduced. As we get closer to Christmas, those pressures will worsen.

The principles behind universal credit remain important. We need a simplified benefit system, and work should pay. However, the problems that have arisen suggest that the rollout of universal credit should be paused until those problems have been resolved. First, we have to shorten the period that recipients have to wait for their payment. It is unreasonable to make people wait for six weeks, given that they are inevitably people with few resources. Secondly, monthly payments are intended to replicate the world of work, but how many monthly-paid employees would be happy to wait for their money until at least seven days into the next month? Anyway, 10% of all employees are actually paid weekly. Why should universal credit claimants be treated differently from weekly wage earners? Thirdly, around 20% of those entitled to a full payment face delays caused by forms being incorrectly completed. Many of these people need help completing forms, and the Government have to do more by building in the availability of personal help to their standard procedures. They should not assume that everyone has the capacity to fill in the forms themselves.

I am grateful to Thirteen Housing Group, which manages nearly 33,000 properties, mostly in Tees Valley, for its advice on universal credit in Hartlepool, where full service went live last December. Its figures on housing debt are disturbing. I remind the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that the level of debt caused by universal credit is real and not scaremongering. At the end of August this year, the average debt of universal credit recipients who were tenants of Thirteen Housing Group was £722.66, compared to an average debt of £418.92 for all Thirteen Housing Group tenants. As for the numbers of individuals affected by debt caused by universal credit, 1,008 out of 1,229 in Hartlepool—that is 82% of all those in receipt of universal credit—were in debt in August. This compares with 11,524 tenants out of more than 32,000 customers across the whole of the Thirteen Housing Group—that is 36%—who were in debt at that time.

The evidence that the operation of universal credit is causing rising debt and increasing worries to tenants is now clear for all to see. Surely the basic principle should be this: tenants need to receive the right amount of money at the right time to pay their rent and not get into arrears. I hope that the Minister will agree, when she comes to sum up, that the time has come for the Government to make reform of universal credit a priority. I hope very much that the Chancellor will do that next week.

Intergenerational Fairness in Government Policy

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham for enabling us to have this debate. It is a particular pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and to listen to his experience, because that experience is of such enormous value to this House, particularly that relating to the prevention of poverty and ill health. I wish him very well with his campaigning.

I, too, am a baby boomer. I was born into a very different world, with very limited opportunities for travel, for example, and many more limits in terms of consumer goods and communications. I entered married life when we saved up to buy things, and we had no credit cards. I noted the comments of the noble Lord, Lord True, about the fact that we are simply in a very different world. It is not necessarily a better world or a worse world: it is simply a different world. I had the benefit of a final salary pension, which I obviously still enjoy. I went to university with my fees paid and I had a grant towards living costs. Of course, in those days, very few people went to university; these days, many people go to university, and, as we have learned, there is now a huge national debate taking place about issues of student support.

I thought that my noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham was right to say that this is a long-term issue that needs vision and inclusive thinking. I also think that the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, was particularly important, partly because he is a member of the Intergenerational Commission. He reminded us that the equitable distribution of resources should be at the heart of government policy, and I concur with what he said. If our debate today helps that national debate, we will have done the issue a service. I emphasise that I, too, do not see the debate on this issue as being about conflict between generations. It is, rather, about being aware that today, average pensioner household incomes exceed those of non-pensioners after housing costs are taken into account. That is evidence of intergenerational unfairness.

The latest facts on housing are of great concern. In July this year, the average price of a domestic property was £226,000. It had risen by £11,000—or 5%—over the previous year. The number of new affordable homes —that is, the sum of those at affordable rent, social rent, intermediate rent and affordable home ownership—fell in England from 66,000 in 2014-15 to just 32,000 in 2015-16. The English Housing Survey tells us that, on average, households in the private rented sector had higher housing costs than those with a mortgage.

The Government have undertaken a number of measures in an attempt to alleviate some of the problems relating to housing. They have introduced Help to Buy, which was needed to help those facing high prices with limited incomes. It has helped people to buy some 135,000 properties, which in turn has helped to boost housing supply in a limited way. There is, however, also evidence that it has encouraged an increase in house prices and supported the speculative development model which results in builders paying high prices for land and subsequently land banking it. As I have said on a number of occasions, we need taxation to be levied on those who deliberately sit on land on which they have secured planning permission but not built.

The Government have undertaken a number of measures, such as the housing infrastructure fund and the homebuilding fund, which have only tinkered with the problem of demand vastly outrunning supply—for the big problem in housing is supply. The Government have published a White Paper about it and are about to publish a Green Paper on the future of social housing. Then, last weekend, the Secretary of State intervened to say that the Government should borrow more to build homes, something that these Benches have regularly called for. Although he was right to do so, the Treasury is being difficult. We therefore now have an unhelpful public disagreement within government. The Government have a problem with their commitment to build 1.5 million new homes by 2022, but it is essential that those homes get built to reduce the impact of the shortage of homes not only over that period but in succeeding years. Doing so will require public support for direct government intervention in further measures that will directly help young people.

The evidence of inequalities is becoming pretty stark. The OECD recently said that the Government have allowed regional and intergenerational divisions to worsen, leaving millions outside the south-east in low-skilled jobs. The Financial Conduct Authority has said that one person in six would not cope with an increase of £50 in monthly bills. Many of those are young. The Institute for Public Policy Research this month reported that young people were being left further behind. Half our country—many of them young—have average household wealth of £3,200, whereas the richest 10% own 45% of the country’s wealth. The International Monetary Fund said very recently that it is time to tax the rich to help the poor. I concur with that. When we read that 15 million people of working age in this country are not paying into a pension, we should be very worried.

As an example of what the Government are doing wrong, we could look at the changes made earlier this year in housing benefit entitlements for 18 to 21 year-olds, when the age of majority is 18. It is a form of discrimination as it takes money away from younger people. Let the Government build more houses by direct intervention and let us now lead a national debate to ensure that we improve intergenerational fairness and not simply think about who can secure the most votes at the next election.

Housing: Planning Laws

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I welcome what the noble Lord has said about the Prime Minister’s announcement on lifting the local housing allowance cap on supported housing. That is welcome. We now need to move on to an agreed model for supported housing. On planning consents, the planning system granted consent for 304,000 new homes in the year up to March this year, which is up 15%. However, the noble Lord’s point is a good one. A third of new homes granted permission between 2010-11 and 2015-16 have yet to be built. That is where we need to focus. In the Autumn Statement last year, the Chancellor announced £2.3 billion of funding for housing infrastructure. That is to be focused on those sites where we have planning consent but, for infrastructure reasons, development is not taking place. We hope that will unlock sites for 100,000 homes in areas of greatest need. On raising the cap on local authority borrowing, he will see from Hansard, in my reply to last week’s debate, that there are circumstances in which we would consider lifting the local authority borrowing restrictions.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interests in the register. I do not think this should be about liberalising the planning system, but rather about making the current system work better. Is the Minister aware of the very recent study by the Royal Town Planning Institute, which shows that we need more, not less, planning for getting large sites right without the delays and compromises we see so often? Does the Minister agree with that statement because, if so, there is an issue about the resourcing of planners from planning fees?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

There is indeed an issue, which is why we have decided that local authorities should be allowed to raise their planning fees by 20%, as long as the proceeds are then ring-fenced and ploughed back into the planning system. We are also looking at the so-called viability assessments, which sometimes hold up the planning process. The noble Lord will know that Ministers have powers to intervene where, for whatever reason, local authorities are dilatory in coming forward with local development plans.

Housing: Availability and Affordability

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my vice-presidency of the Local Government Association. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, for enabling us to have this debate. It has proved to be extremely important: it could serve as a compendium for the Government of both what is wrong with housing in this country and what they should do about it.

From these Benches, my noble friend Lord Greaves reminded us that the Government have promised to build more homes but their policies have not delivered them. He also emphasised the need for greater local flexibility. He said, rightly, that the planning system is not to blame because nearly all planning applications are approved, with several hundred thousand unfulfilled permissions as we speak. He also reminded us that neighbourhood plans can build more houses than is the case with top-down planning.

My noble friend Lord Stunell reminded us that the Government want to build more homes, and I agree that they do, but he pointed out the obvious problem, which is that there is a ceiling on the number of private homes that a private builder will build without a subsidy. He also reminded us that planning is not a bottleneck, and he emphasised the importance of building on smaller sites because you build more quickly. He then asked how we build the extra homes. He said that to deliver a steady, consistent investment, we require local authorities to build more and that they can produce best value for money. He too pointed out the impact of Help to Buy on rising prices.

My noble friend Lord Stoneham of Droxford talked about the value and potential of housing associations, but he pointed out their need for certainty and continuity of policy. He raised the question of policies on rents—subsidy levels, the impact of rent levels on the ability to build more new homes and the impact of rent levels on those of modest means. He also reminded us of the problems caused by the business model of private housebuilders and the need for us to focus on and promote public/private partnerships. He too raised questions about Help to Buy.

My noble friend Lady Grender reminded us of the scourge of homelessness. She too, in the hours before the Prime Minister’s speech, experienced that burst of optimism that the Government were going to build council housing at a level not seen for a generation. However, that shows no sign of being fulfilled. She asked the Minister whether the Government would ever get to the situation where it replaced sold council houses on a one-for-one basis.

The last 20 years have seen 15 Housing Ministers and over 100 Bills affecting housing policy. Despite all that effort, we have built 100,000 homes too few every year for those 20 years. The Government admit that we have a broken housing market. In recent years, public investment in housebuilding has declined by half, when housing benefit costs have almost doubled because of the shortage of homes and rising rents. The Government need to build more homes that people can afford to live in—that should be the Government’s strategic aim.

Surely it was foreseeable that, unless action was taken to build more social homes for rent, rents, homelessness and government costs would rise. We have ended up in a situation where 20% of households in this country are in private rented accommodation. The total has risen by 1 million households in the last 10 years. The Government are still not getting to the root of the problems of housing supply, and that is because they promote owner-occupation to the exclusion of building enough homes for affordable and social rent. As an example of the problems that this causes, since 2015 the Government have overseen the sell-off of over 25,000 council homes, replacing just one in three of them.

In March this year, the Chartered Institute of Housing said:

“The government’s ambition to solve the housing crisis will not be possible if an imbalance in housing funding continues”.


The institute pointed out that just £8 billion of the £51 billion earmarked for housing up to 2021 will directly fund affordable homes. The consequences of that policy are clear.

As we have heard, there is some evidence that the Government are responding in aspirational terms to building more homes generally. They now accept that there is a housing need amounting to 266,000 homes a year for the next 10 years. My question to the Minister is: do the Government have an action plan that will deliver those homes?

The Prime Minister’s announcement at the Conservative Party conference that the Government would put in an additional £2 billion for affordable and social housing sounded better than it has proved to be. It is just one-fifth of the extra subsidy going into Help to Buy and from it we will apparently secure only an extra 5,000 homes for social rent a year. That is a very small number, which is described as “a start”, but we have known about this problem for some considerable time and we should not be in the position where we are still trying to start.

There is a value to be addressed here. I feel very strongly that someone on the living wage should be able to afford to live reasonably close to where they work. Many are not able to do so because of the cost of housing. If this is not addressed, things will only get worse. I suspect that the Government’s announcement and their Green Paper will not do much to build the volume of social homes for rent that are needed. The Government acknowledge that there is a problem but it is very hard to see how the announcement by the Prime Minister will deliver a long-term solution to the unaffordability of housing for those on low household incomes. Social housing units now stand at 4 million, whereas there were 5.5 million just over 30 years ago. Successive Governments have not replaced homes sold under right to buy. I think that we are reaching the point where local housing authorities should have the right to decide whether homes in their area are sold.

As we know, home ownership is at an all-time low. For young people under 35, over the past 15 years it has dropped from 58% to 37%. That is a huge decline which cannot be allowed to continue. We have already heard the comment that I am about to make but I agree entirely that housing needs Cabinet-level representation—it needs a higher focus in Whitehall.

In addition, housing associations and councils must be seen as part of the solution, with sustainable long-term financial frameworks for councils to build more new homes, including for supported housing, through borrowing to build against their assets. I particularly appreciated the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Horam, who identified a blockage in the Treasury on this issue.

I think that we have to redefine the meaning of “affordable”. The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, explained the problem. Maybe it means about 30% or less of household income. We have heard about viability assessments not being public, and that is something that the Government have to look at. The Government too have to change the rules to ensure that public land disposal enables new homes to be built. We should not require public bodies to sell at best consideration, something that the White Paper promised. We should instead be using social return as a basis for decision-making, as well as financial return.

This debate is all about availability and affordability, and has turned into a challenge to Treasury orthodoxy. It has been a very good debate, but as we speak, homelessness continues to rise and more than a million households are awaiting a social home to rent. That is an unacceptable situation.