Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-10
Topic: Housing
Robert Kerslake (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 68B and 68C, which are in this group and are connected to my amendment. I declare my interest as chair of Peabody and president of the Local Government Association Just before I come to the specifics of my amendment, I want to pick up three things that have come out in the debate—two of them from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. The first is the title of the scheme that we are taking forward, and I do not think that this is a question of semantics. It is described as "right to buy" but in these circumstances it will in fact be not a right to buy but an opportunity to buy subject to the discretion of the housing association. It would be helpful to know how the Minister intends to deal with that point if we are to avoid there being an awful lot of disappointed people Secondly, I absolutely endorse the view that there is a need for more houses. This is the most important issue that we are addressing here, and it is also important to say that we need more houses of all types and tenures. That is because, no matter how fast we build—my London Housing Commission report, which was published earlier in the week, suggested that we needed to double the rate of supply in London—and even if we build for 10 years on that basis, it is clear that it will not be possible to get to a point where every property is affordable for an ordinary Londoner. It therefore follows that you have to look at policy in a more fine-grain way. We need both more houses and more affordable rented houses. If we do not produce both, we will exclude a large number of people. This goes to the heart of the debate that we are having at the moment Lastly on this issue, it is very important that we do not have any sense that these properties are surplus. I made that point this morning and I emphasise it because we have come back to this debate again. When I first went to Sheffield as chief executive in 1997, there were parts of the city where you could literally walk into a local authority property. But they have all gone. Almost every part of the country is now light years away from that world. In most areas there is now a desperate shortage, particularly of properties that are likely to end up being sold off as and when they become vacant. We must not lose sight of the heartache that it will cause people who are in desperate need. Examples that I know of involve families with five children in one bedroom who will see properties that they might have occupied being sold off. We must not lose sight of this point I come back to my amendment. Before lunch, the Minister said that my previous amendment lacked a requirement for one-for-one replacement. Well, here it is. This set of amendments would put in the Bill the following. First, they would make clear on the face of the Bill the requirement for one-for-one replacement outside London. Secondly, they say that, where practical—I absolutely accept that it will be difficult in some places—the intention of, and expectation on, local authorities should be to achieve not just one for one but like for like. That goes back to my previous point: it is not the same to take away a social rented property in one area and replace it with a starter home 20 miles away. They are not the same. So we are saying that, where practical, local authorities should look to achieve like for like as well The third thing that we say—this absolutely goes to the heart of deliverability—is that, if we are in a world where the Government will not wholly grant-fund the replacement process for local authorities, they will give local authorities the ability to borrow in order to do this. It cannot be borrowing within an existing cap, because that funding will almost certainly have been allocated for the renovation and improvement of existing properties and for existing new-build housing programmes. If this is genuinely to be additional funding, local authorities need additional borrowing capacity. It would be helpful if the Minister could say that not only has more money been put in but, if local authorities do not get the full funding, they can have absolute confidence that they will be able to get the equivalent amount of borrowing that they need, in addition to the borrowing capability that they already have. That would go a long way to addressing the issues The last point here is that where there is a case for moving around the expectations across a combined authority, exactly as has been said by a number of noble Lords, there should be flexibility within a combined authority area to focus resources in the places where the need is greatest. That is the effect of the amendment. I say "outside London" because in the Bill there is a requirement for authorities in Greater London to replace not just one for one but two for one. It is a very stark requirement that says those authorities "must ensure" that the number of new affordable houses is at least two for one. For me, it is therefore inexplicable that we would not say the same thing for authorities outside London. I appreciate that demand in London is very high—that was absolutely the subject of my report. But demand is also high outside London as well. Yes, there is an issue of demand in London—there is also the issue of the mayoral election in May, which is worth noting—but that alone does not justify the completely different positioning of housing outside London from housing inside London. Will the Minister explain why we would have a situation where the Bill has a two-for-one requirement for London but nothing for the rest of the country? That is inexplicable to me, and I would be grateful for an explanation.