Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-08
Topic: Housing
Gary Porter (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, perhaps the Committee will indulge me for a few minutes. I benefited from the right to buy in the 1980s, so unusually I have to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Best, because I think that that was one of the mistakes this House has made in the past 30-odd years. The number of people who could have had access to home ownership was reduced, and as a country that is something we should be ashamed of. Why should the tenants of a registered social landlord have been precluded from an offer that had been made to the tenants of a council? There can be no justification for people living in two identical houses in the same street and in exactly the same personal circumstances where one has the right to buy and the other has not. If we had wanted to fight the battle on right to buy, that should have been done as a point of principle, full stop, not according to who the landlord was. Tonight’s debate is really a pretty poor show for the 1.3 million people who will be expecting the Government to deliver on their commitment to give them the right to buy There are issues with the right to buy that I strongly disagree with, as well as ones that noble Lords on the other side would not want me to disagree with on the basis that it should not have been a voluntary deal. I do not think that RSLs should have been able to do a voluntary deal; they should have been compelled to do the same deal as councils. Given that it is a voluntary deal, all of the amendments that noble Lords are talking about this evening are a waste of time because we have to trust our RSL friends—there are a number of them in this Chamber—to deliver what we expect them to deliver. If we put it on the face of the Bill, we will scupper the voluntary deal and the Government will have to make it a mandatory one. RSLs will then be treated the same as councils. From my point of view that is a good thing because I do not see why my members should have to pay for the failure of RSLs to deliver the policy properly—which this is. If RSLs were forced to do what councils have done, we would get more homes and home owners and it would cost us less money. We all know that the only difference between a home owner and a home renter is access to capital. Why does it matter to us if a house is sold in five, 10 or however many years after it has been bought? The house does not disappear; it is still there and someone is living in it. If a person has managed to get capital out of it, they have not disappeared with that capital; they have bought another property somewhere else that someone else was paid to build, so it has created more jobs I do not understand what the fetish is around expecting someone to exercise the right to buy and then die in the same house. I was 24 when I bought my registered social landlord house. My father is 96. Do we really think that it would have been a good thing for the country if I and my family had lived in the same property for 72 years? Where would the benefit of that have been for anybody? The capital I put back into the system was freed up so that another home could be built and future generations were able to live somewhere. As my life moved on into better circumstances, I was able to move out of that home with my family to a better area where my children’s life chances increased no end. Who lost out on that? Nobody. What we will do by restricting access to the right to buy is prevent other generations getting the same thing With all respect—I know that noble Lords have good reasons for doing this—the exceptions needed to be built in at the start to reduce the cost to councils. Now that we have a voluntary scheme, councils are going to end up having to pay for it anyway, and that is what is wrong with this. I think that the money should come from central taxation, and that central taxation should be taken, probably, from the hidden profits that RSLs generate. They do generate them but they will not admit to it. Their business model could be reshaped and that would get us out of this, in particular on things like borrowing—£800 million a year too much on their borrowing requirements. That should be restructured and the money put into the pot before any councils are forced to pass over money. I will talk about this later when we reach the amendments dealing with the sale of high-value assets. Again, I do not disagree with the principle of selling them but I do disagree with the money being taken away from councils to be given to inefficient RSLs.