Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-10
Topic: Housing
John Horam (Conservative, Centre-right): That is the problem that produces the large discounts necessary to make the scheme work. The noble Lord has re-emphasised this in his remarks The other way of tackling this, which we have dealt with on previous days in our debates, is for the person who buys the house to pay back some of the discount they got in the initial phase over a period of 10 or 20 years or over whatever period. That may seem to many people also to be a fair way of reducing the cost and making a reasonable deal I shall put two other thoughts into the debate because I appreciate that we are dealing with the fundamentals of this issue at this stage. First, the Government would be wise to be as flexible as they can be in the way they negotiate with local councils in doing the deals in this area. Therefore the Bill should be as flexible as possible. Much of this will end up in a bargain between the local authority, the Government and the Department for Communities and Local Government, the details of which we cannot anticipate and do not know at this stage. The Government would be wise to write the Bill and the regulations so that they are as wide as possible to allow for local circumstances because, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, pointed out, facts will change with the housing situation we are in. It is developing very rapidly. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, made the point that house prices are increasing very rapidly in London and the situation may change even over a year. Maximum flexibility in what the Government expect from local authorities is required Secondly—and this may be outwith the scope of the Minister today, as I appreciate that it is really a matter for the Treasury more than Ministers of his department—the Government should think about raising the cap on local authority borrowing for housing. The way the cap works at the moment is ridiculous. It disadvantages housing investment by comparison with, for example, cycle lanes, leisure centres and things of that kind. It completely distorts the way we look at local authority funding, and that cannot be right in the present situation. It puts a cap on what local authorities can do. My understanding from some of the figuring that has been done, for example in the paper by Capital Economics for Shelter in 2014, is that local authorities could spend up to £7 billion a year more on housing if the cap on their borrowing powers was raised. I am well aware that that immediately gets into the problem we have also been wrestling with about how you define that method of dealing with the problem and at the same time keep the Government’s commitments on debt and deficit Looking at the paper which Capital Economics did in conjunction with KPMG and others I see that there are many ways in which the financing could be arranged so that, although the debt might increase, the deficit would not. There are ways around the situation in which the Chancellor finds himself in which he could still help with housebuilding. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, Professor Wren-Lewis, a distinguished economist from Oxford, and many others have already pointed out that now is the perfect time to invest in housing. As this is capital investment as opposed to current spending, it would be received very well by capital markets around the world. Whatever method you chose publicly to account for this, I do not believe that you would have a thumbs down from the capital markets. On the contrary, they may see it as an extremely sensible thing to do. Indeed, many of the larger financial organisations in the world—the IMF, the OECD et cetera—are calling for this sort of investment to boost growth at this time. There is a way of making the underlying philosophy and underlying mechanisms in the Bill work, but they will require a lot of flexibility and imagination on the behalf of the Government.