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House-building Programme

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for the chance of this debate. She was my most excellent team leader when we faced Mr Paxman in the equivalent to ““University Challenge””. We did not do too well then. Perhaps we can do better today. I particularly hope that we will succeed later today in the very important renovation of the Conservative Party, of which I have great hopes. One of the encrustations that we need to knock off that edifice is the association between the Conservative Party and nimbyism. As regards housing, we have become linked with the interests of those who have and who want to keep it that way. We have allowed new Labour, in particular, to camp on what is, to my mind, our natural territory and certainly the bit of it that I occupy, which is for people to aspire to better things and hope that life for them and their children will be better and, in this context, they want better housing. Gordon Brown has done extremely well in camping on that territory. The Barker report is a very firm foundation on which he can lay claim to that territory. I support many of the recommendations and conclusions of the Barker report. I am not surprised at the Liberal Democrat Party, but I am surprised when members of our party deny basic economic truths just because the conclusions they lead to are inconvenient. It is absolutely obvious that not building houses is one of the causes of prices going up. It is basic economics which you cannot get away from. There may be other causes, but that has to be one of the underlying fundamental reasons. I am also delighted to see the recent report, which has its origins in Rowntree, which showed the origins of this housing demand. It made it absolutely clear that these are our own people who want additional housing—our grandmothers and our children. It is not incomers or people migrating even from other parts of the United Kingdom. It is our own people who are generating this housing need. It is our own communities that we are denying when we stand in their face. However, I think that Gordon Brown will be in trouble because of the way in which he and the Government have chosen to move forward with the housing ambitions which, quite rightly, come from their analysis of the market. They have gone for targets and central diktat. It is very clear that the ODPM intends to run a steamroller over nimbies, which is self-defeating in the end. If people aspire to something, it is probably aspiring to becoming nimbies in their own term. Certainly, it is the experience that if you are building phase three of a housing development, the most vocal objections come from the occupants of phase two. Nimbies are not ““not us””, they are all of us. We are all like that. We have to understand those motivations, but we have, in understanding them, to accommodate aspiration in the way in which, I think in our party, we have not done. I think that the Labour Party is making the opposite mistake of not understanding the needs and aspirations of those people who are already in possession. As I said, central diktat will be the real downfall of this Government. They are failing to provide for the old, for instance, and those with particular housing needs. One of the effects of enforcing the building of lots of little boxes on brownfield sites in the centre of cities is that the sites which are suitable for building specialist accommodation for old people are no longer available. As has been said earlier, they have to rattle around in places that are too big and unsuitable because no one is building specialist accommodation for them. As my noble friend Lord Caithness said, the places that we are building in the middle of cities will just become the ghettoes and slums of the future because they are not what anyone will want to live in. We have to accommodate aspiration. Several noble Lords, in particular the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, have drawn attention to the problems of the north. Well, fine, but exporting poor people to the north is not the answer. We have to encourage real economic regeneration in the north. With our planning policies, we are stopping that from happening. You cannot build a house which is suitable for a managing director in the north for love nor money. You cannot move the middle classes north. You cannot move those who are going to generate wealth and new businesses north because you are not allowed to build houses, communities and facilities for them. A good house in Yorkshire is more expensive than a good house in some parts of the south. It is utterly ridiculous. As several noble Lords have said—in particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, and the noble Lords, Lord Cobbold and Lord Cameron—we are utterly devastating our villages by not accommodating their small and gradual needs within these grand central plans. Naturally, people have limited imagination—I do not mean that pejoratively, but naturally. If you are planning things centrally, you want to do it in large lumps. I recently endured the Hampshire County Council consultation on where to put houses. It cannot think of less than 5,000 houses at a time. The fact that my village needs another two houses every five years does not come into it. It gets excluded because it is too small to think of. So my village is left to die. I want to see something much more local. In getting there, we can build on a couple of positive innovations by this Government. One is the National Institute of Clinical Excellence, the idea that you can have an expert body that can arbitrate on the real needs and background of a problem. How many houses do we need? What sort of houses do we need? Where is the market demand? How do you judge the Barker inputs? That can be done by something expert but outside the political process, because essentially it requires an expert judgment. Secondly, it is necessary to see local authorities as facilitators, not as governors. Hampshire County Council, which is my county council, is far too big to understand my local problem. But it is needed as an integrator. At my local level, I cannot see what needs to be done about roads, infrastructure and school provision. The council is needed to make them function in a way that I can comprehend. But essentially, decisions should be taken by local communities, by villages and towns generating the specification of what should be done in their areas. To the extent that they are having to respond to a central diktat that will come from NICE or its property equivalent, if they choose not to build in their area, then they pay something extra, for example, £500 a head extra on council tax or something like that. If they do their bit, that is fine. If they do more, then they get some financial reward. People can be incentivised. They can be allowed not to develop, but if they do what is required of them and play their part then they are essentially allowed to do what their local community wants to see happen. That would be a truly Conservative solution to this problem.