argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Sadiq Aman Khan (Labour, Centre-left): Does my right hon. Friend not find it remarkable that, at a time when new homes being built in inner London are being bought by investors from overseas, this Government are forcing councils to sell off family homes to those very same foreign investors? That comes at a time when Londoners’ need for affordable homes has never been greater.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
John Healey (Labour, Centre-left): Indeed. My right hon. Friend makes a powerful point and speaks very powerfully for the capital. He speaks for the capital and for councils in areas that are led by Labour and by the Conservatives. London and places such as York, where there are high-value homes, are exactly the areas where councils will be forced to sell off houses. In Westminster, for instance, almost three quarters of council homes—nearly 9,000 of them—above the high-value threshold will have to be sold to pay for the policy not in Westminster or in London but across the country, in order to meet the Chancellor’s and the Conservative party’s manifesto pledge.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Andrew Francis Slaughter (Labour, Centre-left): My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. In Hammersmith, the policy applies to 50% of homes—6,500 homes. In Kensington and Chelsea, it is 97% of the stock. Those areas are the most expensive in London and areas in which the crying need for affordable houses is the greatest.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
John Healey (Labour, Centre-left): My guess is that the Conservative leaders of Kensington and Chelsea and of Westminster have had an influence on the Conservative leadership of the Local Government Association, because it has made it clear that it opposes the plan and it has warned of the consequences "in particular on council waiting lists, homelessness and housing benefit." Alongside this policy, clauses 3 to 6 overturn 25 years of planning law established by the Conservatives in 1990, with cross-party support, to require developers to help to provide affordable homes. So the very system of planning obligations that has delivered nearly 250,000 genuinely affordable homes to rent and to buy in the past decade will be set aside by Ministers imposing starter home obligations only. It is a field day for developers, and a dark day for families wanting to rent or buy an affordable home.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Clive James Charles Betts (Labour, Centre-left): Are not the legislative proposals on starter homes worrying for two reasons? Irrespective of the merits or otherwise of the starter homes, the provision will not add a single property to those being built over the course of this Parliament. Every property built as a starter home will replace a home that would have been built under section 106 obligations on an affordable basis. Secondly, this is an incredibly centralising measure under which central Government will dictate the details of planning permissions given on every site for which a local authority receives a planning application.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
John Healey (Labour, Centre-left): No wonder the Minister’s Back Benchers look so concerned, because this bluster—this promise of big housing numbers from which the Government are falling so far short—will not wash. He has his own track record. Never mind blaming Labour, never mind the previous Parliament: five years of failure on housing under Conservative Ministers is what he has to answer for. Moreover, he did not answer the important question for this House and for the public about the proper scrutiny of this Bill—that is, whether the draft regulations for these sweeping new planning powers will be available to the Public Bill Committee. He is nodding his head, but I am not sure whether that is a yes or a no. I will give way again if he would like to give us a yes or a no on the draft regulations.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
John Healey (Labour, Centre-left): I will send the hon. Gentleman a copy of the Lyons report, which contains exactly the answer to that problem. The problem for him now is this: even where councils and local communities have local plans in place, the Secretary of State is taking powers under this Bill to override them—even when they have been consulted upon, agreed and put in place. That should worry the hon. Gentleman The Bill is an extraordinary personal and political retreat for the Secretary of State. He was Mr Localism—the Minister for city deals, the Minister who signed off the radical devolution of housing finances for councils in 2012. Now he is the Minister fronting this Bill with 32 new centralising powers and a legalised cash grab from councils for the Chancellor. He was Mr Moderate Centre Ground—the Conservative Minister with political roots in the old Social Democratic party, and the Minister who managed to strike a widely welcomed balance in the national planning policy framework in 2012 between the rights of local residents and the requirement to build more homes. Now he is the Minister explaining extreme plans that will all but end new affordable housing for social rent and overturn 25 years of planning law to let house builders completely off the hook over new affordable homes and mixed developments The Secretary of State was Mr Decency—the well-meaning Minister whom people felt they could deal with and trust. Now he is the Minister who would have known that the Office for National Statistics reclassification of housing associations was on the cards. He ducked the questions that I put to him earlier, but he encouraged housing associations to do the "voluntary" deal anyway. He is the Minister who, as the House has seen this afternoon, has to duck and dive to evade the truth that council and housing association homes sold off under this Bill will not be replaced one for one, like for like, let alone in the local areas in which they are lost However, I do have some sympathy for the Secretary of State.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
John Healey (Labour, Centre-left): At the risk of disagreeing with my hon. Friend, I do have some sympathy for the Secretary of State. The Bill is driven by the politics of the Conservative party, not the housing needs of the country, and it is not really his Bill. Like the cut to tax credits, this Bill is the Chancellor’s work, with his political fingerprints all over it. It is a Bill that makes the same mistakes as tax credits—divide-and-rule politics overriding good policy; and like tax credits, it faces a looming row on all fronts. Above all, it fails the same low and middle-income working families that the Tories claim they will represent. It will lead to a huge loss of affordable homes to rent and buy, and be a huge let-down to those who believed the Tory election pledges. The Bill will prove to be bad policy and bad politics. It will be a slow-burn problem all the way to 2020, and we will oppose it in the Lobby tonight.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Other
Natascha Engel (Labour, Centre-left): Order. There are 55 Members who wish to speak in the debate. I will start with a time limit of five minutes on all Back-Bench speeches. That does not include the SNP spokesperson, of course. If Members could keep interventions to a minimum if they wish to speak, we might get through the list. The more interventions there are, the less likely we are to get through the list.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
John Healey (Labour, Centre-left): The hon. Gentleman has given a list of the SNP Government’s record, but how does he explain the fact that after eight years of that Government, more than 150,000 people are still on council waiting lists and half of all homes in Scotland still fall short of the official quality standards?
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Dawn Petula Butler (Labour, Centre-left): Westminster City Council, which is next door to the Prime Minister’s favourite borough, has a very wise leader who states that right to buy could wipe out swathes of social housing and that because of this Bill "we will not be able to house the people that we need to house."
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Clive James Charles Betts (Labour, Centre-left): I shall begin with the aspects of the Bill with which I agree. There are some measures on the private rented sector that I can support, not least because the proposals on fixed penalty notices are an easier way to deal with landlords who are misbehaving in certain circumstances, and the rent repayment orders were recommendations of the Select Committee, as set out in its report during the last Parliament I am sorry that the Government have not gone further in dealing with the continuing problem of the very short tenures that most people in the private rented sector have or with the problem of the lack of resources of local authorities. The Government ought to consider allowing local authorities to keep fines that are levied on landlords, so as to help pay the cost of prosecuting those landlords who behave badly and bring the whole sector into disrepute. I hope that the Government will consider placing in the Bill a measure to ensure five-yearly checks on electrical safety in homes. The Government could achieve that very easily and it would help greatly On affordable housing, my great worry about the Bill is that if we are to achieve the 200,000 homes a year that the Government aspire to building—or the 250,000-plus homes that we really need—it can be done only through a serious long-term plan to build social housing for rent in this country. There has been a long-term decline in house building because that whole sector has diminished. What concerns me is that measures in the Bill will lead to the building of fewer houses at rents that people can afford, and that by the end of the current Parliament in 2020 there will be fewer homes to rent than there were in 2015 Let us consider some of those measures. First, let us consider the right to buy. It is possible that some housing associations, if they chose—and it will be a choice—could replace properties on a like-for-like basis in their localities, although that would depend very much on their circumstances, but no information that I have seen, from Ministers or from anyone else, has persuaded me that local authorities have any chance of replacing the properties that they will have to sell off on a like-for-like basis in their localities. I am sure that the Select Committee will explore that issue further. It will be very interesting if Ministers are able to provide the Committee with evidence The starter home measures also present problems and challenges, because they do not propose the building of a single new home. Every starter home will be built in place of the affordable home that would otherwise be built under the current section 106 arrangements. In the last 10 years, nearly a quarter of a million homes have been built for housing associations as a result of section 106 agreements, but no more will be built during this Parliament. There will be starter homes costing up to £450,000, but a whole range of homes for affordable rents will not now be built.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Clive James Charles Betts (Labour, Centre-left): David Orr, who gave evidence to the Select Committee the other day, said that he believed that more homes would be built as a result of the right-to-buy proposals, but also said that the federation did not support the proposals to force a sell-off of council homes to pay for them. He made that very clear. The federation also came out very strongly against the changes in rent levels which the Chancellor introduced in his Budget, and which will cause significant reductions in the number of homes that can be built by both local authorities and housing associations. As a result of these measures, Sheffield county council will lose £27 million of revenue from its housing account and South Yorkshire housing association will lose £7 million over the current Parliament The other day, in the Chamber, I congratulated the Secretary of State on his decentralisation proposals, but another key problem with the Bill is that it is very centralist. The starter homes programme involves micromanaged section 106 agreements. Local authorities currently do a deal on each individual site, but decisions on what homes should be built on each site will now be imposed from the centre. Moreover, planning permissions for building on brownfield sites will be given automatically, and local authorities will not have the right to negotiate infrastructure deals as part of those permissions. In the case of major infrastructure projects, it will be possible for housing to be approved with no local consent whatsoever. The Royal Town Planning Institute has said that "the increase in the powers of Whitehall through these measures is extraordinary." Control of total rents, control of the rents paid by so-called high-income families, and controls forcing local authorities to sell off properties will mean that the housing revenue account—a stand-alone account that was introduced by the Secretary of State when he was a junior Minister a few years ago—is now very firmly in the Chancellor’s pocket Let me make two final points. Can anyone seriously believe that homes costing £450,000 are affordable, or that the income of a family in which two members are working hard and earning the living wage can be described as high, as it is in the Bill? Those two points alone show how out of touch the Government are, and how irrelevant these measures are to the real problems that face most people in this country.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Sadiq Aman Khan (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), who, for the most part, made a very compelling speech. I rise to speak in an absolutely crucial debate for many Londoners. I commend the speeches from my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) on the Opposition Front Bench, and from my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee. There is a housing crisis in London, with a growing shortage of affordable homes to buy and rent. Precious public services are struggling to attract and retain workers, and the city’s businesses cite housing as their single biggest concern. Many Londoners are in distress over housing due to their inability to make any progress on a council housing waiting list or because of poor quality accommodation One of the biggest issues is the rising cost of housing to rent and buy, and, for many Londoners, buying their own home is simply a pipe dream. The average deposit to buy a place—not the purchase price—is now £100,000. That is three times the median salary of someone in inner London, and four times the salary of someone in outer London. As a result, more and more Londoners have no choice but to rent, yet rents in London have now reached an all-time high of £1,300. Rents are rising year on year, and have risen by 38% since 2010. Housing benefit spend—essentially, the taxpayer making up the shortfall between what Londoners can afford to pay and what the market is charging—increased in London from £5.3 billion in 2010 to £6.1 billion now. Add to that the Government’s welfare changes, the bedroom tax, cuts to tax credits and the lowering of the welfare cap, and that pretty toxic combination is hollowing out many inner-London boroughs. That is putting enormous strain on the social fabric of London, and increasing pressure on housing, transport and public services in many of London’s outer suburbs.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Sadiq Aman Khan (Labour, Centre-left): The Conservative leader of Westminster Council was speaking on behalf of Londoners who care about London’s social fabric and are worried about the hollowing out of our city—I wish that more Conservative Members would take up that debate. With the Bill, the Government have a real opportunity to start the process of solving this crisis, but they have flunked it. Instead of solutions, their proposals will make the problems even worse Let me turn to the extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants. Over recent years there has been no like-for-like replacement of affordable homes sold under the existing right-to-buy scheme. The Secretary of State could not dispute figures from his own Department that I put to him, which show that in London since 2012, only one in seven council homes sold have been replaced. How can anyone believe that it will be different this time? There is nothing in the Bill to guarantee that money must be reinvested in the local area, replacing like-for-like sold-off homes Some housing associations are relaxed about selling off homes in inner London and replacing them with units in cheaper parts of outer London or even further afield. That damages London’s social mix, accelerating the exodus of poorer people out of our great city, and making the affordability crisis even worse. To make matters worse, the only way the Government could fund this policy is by forcing councils to sell off the most expensive homes. In London, that means losing substantial amounts of affordable family homes, and the city’s low and middle-income families will be squeezed out to fund the sell-off of housing association homes nationwide. Together with colleagues from across the House who want to join me, I will be fighting to retain the money from housing association and council property sales in London for Londoners. There must also be provision for like-for-like replacements in the same areas as where the properties are sold It is not as if the Government are planning a big boost in truly affordable homes. They have put all their eggs in the starter home basket, but in London starter homes simply will not help struggling first-time buyers. With starter homes capped at a cost of £450,000, someone with a 25% deposit—that, by the way, is £98,000—would need an income of £77,000 to afford one. The Secretary of State talks about aspiration, but who exactly is he talking about This Bill is a missed opportunity. It will not fix London’s housing crisis; in fact it will make it worse. It will not deliver the genuinely affordable homes Londoners need to buy or rent. It will not help the councils and the Mayor to start to build the homes Londoners desperately need. It will not rein in spiralling rent rises for those in the private sector. It will not end the scandal of the homelessness problem Next May’s mayoral election is a referendum on the capital’s housing crisis. This Bill reinforces why that referendum cannot come soon enough.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Stephen James McCabe (Labour, Centre-left): Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the smart move for the Government would be to split the proposals in two. There are some welcome measures in the planning section that could even be strengthened, and the Government could then go back to the drawing board with their housing proposals. That would allow the Secretary of State perhaps to recover some of the nice guy image to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) referred. That might be the way forward According to the Government’s own statistics, rough sleeping is up 55% since 2010, but looking around our towns and cities that seems like an underestimate to me. Many of us will have come across parents with young children at our advice centres who are living either in hostels or in entirely inappropriate accommodation. We have a crisis, and not just in London. I know the Chancellor is not very good at recognising the impact of his policies on real people, but I urge Ministers to look at the Shelter analysis of their starter home plans. It shows that a family on the Chancellor’s national non-living wage will be able to afford a starter home in only about 2% of local authorities across the country. That will not work. Lord Kerslake has pointed out that the Government’s definition of starter homes stretches the definition of affordable housing beyond breaking point I do not understand the obsession with selling off council and housing association properties when there is such a housing crisis. I understand the aspiration of tenants to be homeowners, but I wonder why Ministers think that that aspiration does not extend to tenants in the private rented sector. Why are there no rights for those who rent in that sector As I have said, I welcome part 2 of the Bill, especially the action on rogue landlords and letting agents. I particularly commend the banning orders in clause 13, the database of rogue landlords and the rent payment orders. I also welcome part 5 and the more stringent "fit and proper" test for landlords, and, of course, clause 86, which offers a way forward at the time when the deterrent costs of court action often result in rogue landlords getting off scot-free. It could go further, however. This is about identifying and finding not just unfit landlords but rogue developers and people who exploit permitted development rules daily in my constituency and elsewhere, destroying the family homes we need and creating ugly, often unsafe, HMOs in communities that do not want them and do not need them. This is all done in pursuit of the vast profits they can extract through exorbitant rents and non-existent maintenance and repairs If the Bill was strengthened to protect family homes and to tackle unsafe extensions and breaches of permitted development rules, the Secretary of State would have some prospect of regaining his good guy reputation. As it is, the first part of the Bill is a mess and mistake and the second part simply does not go far enough.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Emma Elizabeth Reynolds (Labour, Centre-left): It is a birthday treat for me to speak in this debate, and to get an extra minute. As we get older, we have a tendency to look back on our childhood. Thirty-three years ago, my mom and I were homeless. She applied to the local council in the west midlands as a single parent with a five-year-old child. After a couple of weeks of staying with friends, we were granted a council flat. I will never forget the security and warmth of our new home, nor my mom’s relief that we were no longer homeless Fast-forward three decades and if we were in the same situation today, we would be put in a hostel, so-called bed-and-breakfast accommodation or the private rented sector. Many families and children are in that situation. They are often uprooted from their communities, support networks and schools, and placed miles away from families and friends. According to figures released by Shelter only today, more than 100,000 children will be in temporary accommodation this Christmas In the early 1980s, council properties were not in short supply. Now, across the country, 1.4 million families are on the waiting list. Councils often do not have properties for homeless families or others who have been on the waiting list for years.
Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Lyn Carol Brown (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her story, because the social costs of these policies are not often aired in our debates. I, too, grew up in a council flat. It was safe, secure and stable, and it enabled my sister and I to thrive and to strive. Is not the real crime of this Government’s housing policy that it will deny so many children the very opportunities that our council properties gave us?