Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-01
Topic: Housing
Benjamin Stoneham (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, we have had a long debate. Though I am reluctant to detain the Committee for too long, I want to speak in favour of these amendments, particularly Amendments 48A, 50B and 50D, to which I put my name. I again draw the Committee’s attention to my interest as chair of Housing & Care 21 We have to ask the Government: are we in this together on housing? The need to build more homes is something we all agree on but I contest the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Young. I accept that a commitment has been made in the Conservative Party manifesto; I respect that, although I do not think it is right and I have some suspicions as to how that figure was snatched out of the ether and arrived at. The question is whether we will build more homes than we would have without this extra policy initiative I think the Government have—certainly the Conservative Party has—a problem with social housing and affordable housing for rent. That is why we have had a setback. We had a problem in the early years of the coalition in getting the Government to put more money into social housing investment. It happened only when the Chancellor became worried about the state of the economy, as far as I could see. At that point, we at last saw some initiatives that encouraged the building of social housing As has been admitted in this debate, we have now gone backwards. If we were really setting out to build more houses we would be building more for private ownership and more for social housing. We had begun to make progress on that at the end of the coalition Government—not enough, I accept, but we had made some. Frankly, we are now going to hit the buffers because of all the initiatives and impetuses behind starter homes and the promotion of home ownership. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said, starter homes will be at the expense of other forms of housing, and that will include social housing. The consequence is that we will build fewer houses than if we had really been in this together and planned to increase home ownership while maintaining a balance by being committed to social housing as well. As a consequence, there will be problems in terms of the design of homes and the communities we build, which will be lopsided and unbalanced. Future generations will come to regret that It has been made quite clear by the noble Lord, Lord Best, that there are other areas of need which the Government seem to be ignoring. We know that the retired population is increasing and we want to have more rightsizing. What initiatives will the Government use to encourage that process? Only this week, we have seen initiatives from the National Health Service, which recognises the importance of housing in health policy. I do not see where the Government will get the extra housing for the retired population It remains the case that homelessness is getting worse. I am sad to admit that it increased during the last years of the coalition. Which of these initiatives address that? Local communities should surely be given the flexibility to address some of those problems rather than go down a route that puts all the emphasis on home ownership. The other consequence will be that the people in real need will be driven into the private rented sector, which will compound our problem with the housing benefit bill because we will be paying out more I would also like to draw attention to the rural area, which the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, covered in his remarks. I cannot think of a more critical area where community needs have to be very carefully planned and provided for if we are going to have balanced communities which feed into the social life of those communities. We have to give more attention to providing affordable homes to local people—we need to make that distinction. As he says—and this is another argument that we are not actually going to increase the number of homes that are going to be built—I know that landlords in my area will be very reluctant to give up their land at a reduced price if they think that in the future people will have the opportunity to make a profit out of that, rather than what they thought, that these homes were going to be used for local people in perpetuity for their social needs and those of the communities in which they live Everybody agrees that there is a problem with supply. If we are going to build more homes that actually meet the demand we have, we need more diversity, mix and balance. As well as helping private ownership, we have to give more attention to social housing. If we do not, we will have all the problems I have mentioned in terms of increasing pressure on homelessness and the encouragement to older people to rightsize being diminished, and therefore we will end up with a worse and unbalanced housing situation, when there was a real opportunity for all of us to be in this together.