Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-03
Topic: Housing
John Lytton (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I have sat on my hands for a considerable while since we started in Committee this morning. I speak to an intriguing amendment, Amendment 41A. Before doing that, I will try to peel back some of the skins of the increasingly complex onion that we appear to be dealing with The first thing to realise is that the housing market is potentially a very volatile animal, and has an enormous number of different subset markets—as we have heard, different parts of the country operate in very different situations. I know that your Lordships’ Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment heard evidence that, in certain parts of the country—not the north-east or the north-west— the market simply has not returned to anywhere near pre-peak levels of value. However, I leave that to one side Earlier, the Minister cited a gap in the market. I question which market we are referring to. Apart from believing that the gap is vanishingly small—we have heard some reasons why other products would effectively fill it anyway; and apart from the means being adopted to plug it in the Bill being vanishingly transient; and, furthermore that the limited category of people whom this type of starter home would actually benefit is, to my way of thinking, irrelevantly small in the overall scale of things, I have to wonder where we are trying to get to We need to be clear about whether society will provide lasting sectoral benefit to that proportion of the population that any social society is bound to try to assist. In that, I include people who may have been property owners at some stage, have fallen on hard times and, for whatever reason, have to depend on the state. When you are dealing with free markets, that sort of thing happens. There will always be a proportion of people—I do not pass judgment on how significant or insignificant—who cannot afford to buy and almost certainly cannot afford to pay a market rent. Are we going to assist those people, or to provide an increasing focus on a windfall gain for the few, without reference to the needs or actual means of the few who will benefit? I question what we are doing here. In introducing Amendment 41A, the noble Lord, Lord Best, identified that the discount and loan assistance taken together is a huge transfer of asset. It is much bigger than the headline 20% figure that we are led to believe applies under starter homes. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, observed on Tuesday, developers are keen on this. Yes, indeed— they would be. Who would not be as an alternative to the affordable housing regime under Section 106, with the uncertain outcomes and unpredictability that that involves? I am not in the least surprised about that. Purchasers of starter homes would also be keen. Who would not be, offered a windfall gain for the asking? I wonder whether we should be devoting quite so much time and effort to this ephemeral social benefit When dealing with the question of housing and the impecunious, I am reminded of a gentleman who once said to me, in connection with council house sales, "If I had that sort of cash, I would put it to a better use than buying this place". I hope that we do not build the sort of place that he was referring to, but I wonder whether, in circumstances of strapped resources in the public domain, we should be funding the ephemeral and assisting those who have access to a deposit that enables them to gain this discount in the first place. There is certainly no gain to the social budget on the sale of a starter home. The mortgage gets paid off, presumably, and the balance of it goes off down the road with someone to their next home. Or, if they have succeeded in being parted from their money, it goes to someone else—some financier who may have come in on the back of this scheme. It was mentioned earlier today that there is absolutely no end to the ingenuity of financiers of all sorts, regular and irregular, who would jump on this bandwagon and might usefully talk people round into doing business with them on the basis that they would share in some of the largesse being provided by society at large I believe that doing more here includes retaining a significant element of social benefit of some sort, and it is a matter for debate how much that should be, for society at large—unless of course you believe that the market will do everything, which of course it will not and cannot. History shows us that it does not.