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House-building Programme

My Lords, that was precisely what I was referring to; I am absolutely at one with my noble friend. The second point that Yvette Cooper made was that not only are we building too few new-build houses and bringing too few new properties to the market, but it is also the case that 50 per cent of couples now can probably afford a house. That is low enough, but on present trends less than one third will be able to do so in a decade or two’s time. We therefore need more houses, but we do not need haciendas in Surrey. We need houses that people can afford in places where they want to live and work. We also need to ensure that the balance of housing is towards the affordable end. I argue for a more positive role in relation to council housing and local authorities in this area, but lest that be seen as an old Labour rant, I am also in favour of huge flexibility in this area. I was in favour of the right to buy, provided that the housing stock grows at the same time to meet social provision. I am in favour of bringing private management and private money into what has been the social housing area. I am an admirer of the role of housing associations, but at the end of the day there is still a shortfall in the provision of affordable housing for rent. Part of that has been accomplished and accompanied by some disparaging of council housing and council tenants. I know that a lot of local authorities were pretty poor at managing housing stock in the past, but some of the ways in which we have shifted it to stock transfers and ALMOs has over-ridden the views of the tenants. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, mentioned, the tenants have not been faced with a level playing field in the kind of vote or poll, which, if it were in an emerging democracy, would raise a few queries. Nevertheless, there have been successful ALMOs and successful stock transfers, and I am the first to recognise that. There have also been other cases when ALMOs and stock transferees have proved equally, if not more, bureaucratic and unresponsive to their tenants and their lessees than the pre-existing local authorities. I have knowledge of two areas; central London and south-west rural areas. I accept that the whole of the country is not the same, but many other cities have similar problems to central London, and many other rural areas have similar problems to the south west. In addition to the lack of building of social housing and the lack of refurbishment of existing buildings to bring affordable rented housing to the market, there has been one other development—rent restructuring—which has not been referred to so far. I can understand certain motivations for that policy, but there is a formula based on private rents in the area plus incomes in the area, so social housing rents would rise. The logical conclusion of that, if it were not dampened, would be a threat to the mixed communities that we have in central London, for example. Noble Lords will be familiar with the area round here, where Victorian benevolent societies, followed by the LCC, and the local authorities, followed by modern housing authorities have placed relatively low-cost housing in areas of high affluence in Chelsea and Westminster, for example. But if we move to a situation where rents rise too much in the social housing area, the only people who will occupy social housing will be those on housing benefit. Instead of the Government subsidising the building and the bringing of social housing to the market, they will be doing it through the social security system, and we all know that there are serious problems with housing benefit in the first place. It is true that the Government have rightly protected to a large extent the existing tenants, but there is a real problem with new tenancies when people such as key workers want to come to work in central London and their rents will rise to probably unaffordable levels. Indeed, that is a problem with existing tenants. I know of a problem not far from here involving two households: one is a pensioner who does part-time work and one a single mother who works likewise. One has too much accommodation and one too little. If they swapped, the net effect would be that the combined rents would go up by £300 because they would be treated as new tenants. That is not good management of our existing stock, and we ought to be focusing not only on new build and bringing new property to the affordable market but also on ensuring that we manage the existing stock and existing tenants correctly. Otherwise, the policy will undermine our policies on poverty eradication, key workers and race relations. Country areas have already been referred to, and we have a situation where young people and young couples cannot afford to live in the villages and towns where their families live and where they would like to work. So we have relatively rich people commuting from the villages to the big towns, and relatively poor people commuting from big towns to work in service industries in villages. We have no provision for the nurse, the policeman or the shop assistant being able to live in many of our rural villages, not only in the south west but up and down the country. I should like to make four quick suggestions to the Minister, although my time is running out. First, we should ensure that planning authorities in London and other stress areas have a requirement on every planning development to provide affordable housing for rent, and not just affordable housing, which often in London means flats for £300,000. Secondly, the rent restructuring review that is already going on should slow down the process or at least dampen it for new tenants as well as existing tenants. Thirdly, in country areas we should provide affordable housing for part-rent, part-buy, particularly for those who already have families or jobs in the area. Fourthly, we should look at the way in which we subsidise housing through the social security budget, which seems to me a cock- eyed way of the Government recognising their responsibility for providing social housing. If we do all those things, we can make some dent in the problem, although I recognise that it will inevitably be a long-term strategy.