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Housing

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement made by her right honourable friend in another place. I add my sympathy to all the home owners and owners of commercial premises who are caught up in the present disastrous flooding situation, and, indeed, to those who may yet be caught. I declare an interest in that I own land in Essex. It is always possible that some of that land may become eligible for development and it is right that the House should know that. The background to the Statement is perhaps not quite as rosy as the Minister stated because the Government have seen annual construction fall to a level below that in the 1920s. There has, of course, been some improvement since then, which is a great relief, but the annual housing construction rate is only a little over 50 per cent of what it was when I first entered local government. We cannot be easy about the present situation and, in the circumstances, I did not find it odd that the Prime Minister, in his programme statement last week, focused on housing and planning. Among other things, he referred to brownfield sites. I recall that that was included in an early policy statement by the Labour Government after the 1997 election. The former Deputy Prime Minister made much of what was going to be done—and I acknowledge that it has been very successful with brownfield sites—but there is nothing particularly new about that. There is going to be a review of government and publicly owned properties and the same comments apply; these were early adoptions of policy by the Labour Government. They have shown success but restating that does not take us forward. The Prime Minister referred to some 550 central government-owned sites with a capacity for 100,000 new homes and local government-owned sites for another 60,000 homes. The Statement refers, quite rightly, to the existing 1.8 million sites that are already planned and that the Government would like to have supplied 3 million new homes by 2020. If my arithmetic is somewhere near correct, that merely leaves us with 1,040,000 sites to find over the next decade and a half. I accept that this is the inevitable result of the planning system which, at the moment, is operating to rather too short a timescale, but the real question is: what steps are the Government taking to discuss and get the agreement of local authorities to these new figures, which I am prepared to accept are valid? There has been no resolution of the difference between local government and central government on this matter so far. In my view, the Government’s handling of the issue has been somewhat inept but, without a degree of consensus, there is not much hope of achieving the Government’s target. The Government’s social housing programme is also welcome. Extra funding for 30,000 plus houses will be extremely useful and I acknowledge that it will do a great deal to expand construction in this field. However, social housing, by definition, needs to be where it is wanted; it needs to be in town centres and so on. Looking at sites such as old hospital park sites in green belts, brownfield sites such as redundant airfields, or the Government’s suggested publicly owned sites, will not help on the social housing front. Social housing needs to have easy access to the work places of the people who occupy them. Again, the question is: what work is being done to arrive at agreement with local government on this issue? Finally, I turn to the difficult issue of building on flood-plains. I accept that it has a long historical background. Towns were inevitably built next to river crossings because that was where people gathered, and they have grown from that. There has always been a risk of flooding. Things can be done to ameliorate that but in the end, if the good Lord treats us in a hard way, there will be floods. What is being done to deal with additional flood protection? Much more could be done using artificial flood plains and better construction techniques. More could be done to protect the essential services in particular, such as electricity, gas, water and food, so that their sites were not affected by floods and those services would continue to be available. Part of the difficulty with the present situation is the breakdown of services because of the inability to protect those aspects of supply. That is quite enough from me. I hope the Minister will be able to answer these points, because it is an essential facet of resolving this problem that there has to be a high degree of agreement.