Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-08
Topic: Housing
Benjamin Stoneham (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I would quite like to take up the challenge to the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, as someone who has been involved in housing associations for the past 12 years and chaired three different associations. I assume that the one that I currently chair, Housing & Care 21 is, fortunately, excluded from the right-to-buy provisions—I hope that the Minister will confirm that—because it is involved in retirement housing Personally, I am depressed by this whole debate on the right to buy. I cannot believe that a Conservative Government can produce such a complicated and bureaucratic proposal, particularly when we come on to discuss how it will be funded. Frankly, I fear that they have a manifesto commitment around their neck which ideally they would like to get out of but have failed to do so In the housing association organisation, I was tempted to let the Government get on with their own dirty work in implementing this legislation, but we have a voluntary deal and I respect that. My own association voted against it. But the mistake that the Government have made is that they have ignored the pioneering work that housing associations have been doing over the past 10 years to extend shared ownership. Indeed, they have got involved in private sales. Now the Government are undermining all that by bringing in this right-to-buy legislation. But we have already had the more general debate, so I will not go into that My own priority—and it should be all of ours—is to make sure that we are building more homes, and I have deep doubts about whether this will end up doing that at the end of the day. But we have a voluntary scheme. The only problem with that, which is why I support the amendments to which I have added my name in this group, is that we do not have sufficient oversight of what will go on, especially when there are particular problems. That is why it is important that we have some exclusions achieved through these amendments. I mentioned retirement housing, but supported housing is also excluded. There are already exclusions Rural housing, as this debate has shown, is a particular problem. We know that it is a problem because the stock is attractive. Anyone who has the opportunity of a discount will break the earth to get the advantage of it in a rural area because you would have a very good asset. Even if someone cannot afford it, they will get the help of friends and family or whatever to get that discount. There will be immense pressure on housing associations to sell the stock I want to say a word about how housing associations are run in this country. I personally think that the structure of housing associations has been allowed to grow like Topsy. I am glad to say that quite a lot of the housing associations that I have been involved in have a link with their localities, but a lot of the bigger ones no longer do. We have to look at how the bigger housing associations will behave. I accept that they will generally be honourable, but the problem is that when there is the possibility of disposing of a little rural stock that does not really count for very much in your association and which would get rid of a management problem and is normally quite valuable stock, I am not sure that housing associations will resist the temptation to quietly dispose of those units. It may well be that they are the only source of money grant for building new stock in areas where they can make a greater surplus. I worry about that That is why we have to understand that the successful housing associations are increasingly bigger and will be remote from some of these rural areas. They will not be sensitive to individual rural areas and they could become the agents of government because they simply want to get more grant. We have to be particularly sensitive about that, which is why our role in this House is important. We cannot just leave it to the voluntary scheme. I support Amendments 57B and 57D because the grant must be used to reinvest in the parish or neighbouring parish to where the house is being sold, if that is unfortunately happening. We must recognise that there has to be some restraint in respect of this housing Finally, I want to say a few words about Amendment 57C and community land trusts. I have spoken in earlier debates on this subject. If we do not make some exceptions for the smaller community land trusts, which have often achieved what they have from small, exceptional sites, often having been given the land, we will dry up the source of these exceptional sites. Landowners will simply not give up that land if they think that someone else will make money for themselves out of it. That has to be recognised. For those reasons, the Government must give close consideration to these amendments, which I support.