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Affordable Housing

Indeed. The Committee made recommendations on those matters, which I shall come to later. As I said, housing planning needs to be related to regional and local economic planning. Employment and housing need to be related to each other. Account must be taken of the fact that employment has run ahead of housing in some parts of the country, while the reverse has been the case in others. On housing tenure, the Committee noted that the major decrease in house building numbers has been seen in the provision of social housing. Of course, council housing stock has been eroded through the right to buy. We accept that home ownership is an aspiration for very many because it both meets housing need and provides a way of gaining access to wealth and equity. We also supported the Government’s schemes to promote access to home ownership through shared ownership and equity schemes, but we felt that there had to be not only an increase in the supply of shared ownership schemes, but support for people to enter the market. Support for equity mortgages could otherwise just further price growth, which would not improve the situation. We were worried that there was insufficient emphasis on the supply of social rented housing. When Shelter gave evidence to the Committee, we endorsed its target of building an extra 20,000 new social rented homes annually. We were worried that the Housing Corporation had enormously increased the proportion of its funding being spent on shared ownership. Although social rented housing still represents slightly more than half the housing provided by the Housing Corporation, we want investment in social rented housing to be protected by requiring the corporation to spend a certain percentage of its funds on such housing, rather than allowing the proportion to erode further. A great deal of the pressure for housing growth is coming from changing demography. Again, demographic pressures vary from region to region, but, broadly speaking, there has been an increase in the number of one-person households, which has happened partly because we are all living longer and also because of changing family patterns and relationship breakdown. Those factors need to be reflected in the housing provided in regions. There are shortages in new family housing in many regions, especially social rented family housing. We want to make it clear that new housing must meet the increasing needs of the elderly population, by including provision for sheltered housing, and include housing for people with disabilities. As part of building more sustainable communities, the Government have quite rightly put an emphasis on increasing density in new housing developments. That makes the best use of land and can be much more public transport-friendly. The Committee stressed, however, that that must not lead to a preponderance of smaller units and flats simply to achieve that density. There are examples in which high density has been achieved successfully while still providing family housing. We want the Government to ensure that funding streams are sufficiently flexible and that local authorities are encouraged to use their planning powers effectively to ensure that high density is achieved with a proper mix of housing sizes and tenures. The Committee wants the best use to be made of existing housing and we urge the Government to increase their target on reusing empty homes. We were persuaded that further measures were needed to discourage the purchase of second homes in places such as rural areas and those in which in-comers purchasing second homes, who usually have higher incomes than the existing population, are driving up house prices and depriving local people of access to the housing supply. The Government have not been persuaded on either of those points.