Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-10
Topic: Housing
Patricia Hollis (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I am still worried about the effect of redistribution, given that the levy will not apply to all local authorities evenly. We established on the last Committee day that we are getting redistribution from poorer council tenants to more prosperous housing association tenants. We are also getting, as we learned today, redistribution from local authorities with retained stock to those local authorities which do not have to pay a levy because they sloughed off their stock to set up housing associations in the past. That also means, in practice, that we are getting redistribution from city authorities to rural councils. Some of those may be in beautiful, high-demand areas. An awful lot of them are not; they are just rural district councils in Norfolk and other parts of the country At no point have we had any reference to waiting lists, or the degree of local need, or the anxiety of young people to move, largely to city areas where there are jobs, which is key when, particularly in rural areas, there is no public transport to get you there if you live outside So how will the priority order work? Let us say that my city, Norwich, is required to sell one, two or three high-value houses at £300,000—if we have such; I am not sure that we do. Let us say that we come up to about £1 million. Okay. The local housing associations within the city have 10 people wanting, on average, £50,000 discounts. That is £500,000 gone. Then the other local authorities in Norfolk, which are stock-transfer associations, have built-up demand for a further 50 people, for £2.5 million-worth of discounts. So the sale of five or 10 local authority homes in my city will be funding 10 or 12 discounts, in my city, for housing associations and possibly a further 50 outside my city but in the bounds of Norfolk, by virtue of the way this is going to work As that means that the money from high-value sales in Norwich has been spent three times over, where exactly is the money going to come from for the local authority to replace its lost stock? Where exactly is the money going to come from for my local authority to tackle the derelict land around British Rail stations, or old gas sites, or old industrial, chemically polluted sites? These may need a lot of investment if, quite rightly, they are to be brought back into use. Will the Minister tell us how this is actually going to work? Because I do not understand it I recognise a pattern of redistribution which, as far as I can see, takes no account of housing waiting lists, no account of pent-up housing need and will just circulate money around in different ways. Either the levy will have to be in addition to sales, so that my local authority will be hit twice over, with both the forced sales of high-value properties and a levy in addition, or the local housing associations in my city and beyond, the housing association tenancies in Norfolk as a whole, will just have to queue, or be rationed, or have to wait, in order to buy a housing association home. At the end of the day, none of those houses in Norwich will be replaced. I cannot even begin to see how these figures are going to add up. It is completely impossible unless the Government come in with funding. The Government want this policy so the Government should fund it.