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Debate on Housing Bill - 12 January 2004 Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon) (Con): I beg to move, To leave out from That" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof: this House declines to give a Second Reading to a bill which introduces burdensome, ineffective and bureaucratic information packs; fails to provide a sufficiently clear licensing regime; weakens tenants' right to buy; is unclear on the rules and standards that regulate private sector access to Housing Corporation funds; and, overall, acts as a disincentive to offering property for letting in the UK's weak private rented sector." I draw attention to the fact that I write occasional articles for The Builder. I hope that the House will not think that I am eccentric if I devote my speech to the Bill. It is complex and will merit serious discussion in Committee because its outline raises an enormous number of questions. Parts of the Bill are welcome, subject to their effective implementation and full discussion of their implications, such as the new housing health and safety rating system, which extends to housing the hazard analysis at critical control point principles of risk assessment that apply in other parts of the economy, such as food processing. Further welcome aspects of the Bill are the introduction of the housing ombudsman for Wales and the fact that it includes an acceptance of the need to do more to tackle antisocial behaviour by, for example, strengthening the introductory tenancies that were introduced by the Government in which I served. Other elements of the Bill need urgent clarification and, I suspect, simplification if they are to be capable of effective administration and enforcement, especially the licensing provisions. Other parts of it are simply unnecessary, obstructive, ill-conceived and burdensome, like the seller's pack and the intervention in the housing market. Parts of the Bill are virtually incapable of assessment because it is an enabling measure and no details are given of how the provisions will work in practice, especially private sector access to the social housing grant. Finally, some clauses are presented as intending to tackle abuse, but, when taken in combination with earlier steps, seem set to challenge the operation of well-established policies—for example, the right to buy. The most important part of the Bill is, by common acceptance, licensing. No one will object to measures clearly aimed at reducing loss of life and injury in premises that may often house vulnerable and insecure poor people and families, perhaps with low levels of competence. The measures must, however, be subject to sensible tests of their practicality and effectiveness. Are they as light as possible to deliver the job that they are supposed to do? Are they easily understood, clear and well defined? Are they properly enforceable on a consistent basis? Will they raise the expertise, confidence and standards among landlords, especially in the private sector, to encourage them to place property on the market? We all talk constantly about the need for the private sector to play a fuller part in housing provision in the United Kingdom even though it is such a poor provider in any comparison with other western countries in terms of what it can do. The problem is that the licensing element tries to tackle too many objectives in too many ways. We risk ending up with a cluttered, confusing and congested landscape of regulation that may not even protect the most vulnerable. The Bill proposes mandatory licensing of houses in multiple occupation containing five people and of three storeys. It proposes discretionary licensing of a wider range of houses in multiple occupation. It also proposes selective licensing of all private landlords in designated areas of low demand, in areas that are likely to decline into areas of low demand or in areas that suffer from antisocial behaviour. Those powers may also be used outside areas of low demand to tackle bad landlords and antisocial behaviour. As the Minister said, enforcement is effected by interim management orders or final management orders, with the costs of licensing to be met almost entirely by the licensing fee. The panoply of powers inevitably raises a host of questions. Who decides who is a good or bad landlord? On what basis is that decided? Against what test is the decision made? Is it objective, intuitive or, as the Minister said, generic, whatever that might mean? When can selective powers be used, and for what? In what circumstances would the Deputy Prime Minister expect to authorise licensing of all private landlords, and how extensive will the use of the new discretionary schemes be? What is the degree of antisocial behaviour that will trigger licensing? How is that to be demonstrated? Is it true that the Bill will apply licensing to some owner-occupied self-contained flats for which the duty to license and enforce would fall on freeholders or managers, who have no right to enter the premises to which the regulations apply? The danger is that the Government are creating a complex, fuzzy-edged, overlapping and differentially enforced heterogeneous patchwork of schemes, which will be a deterrent, not an incentive, to landlords and lead to situations in which, for example, five properties that are owned by one person are each under a different regulatory regime. I have no principled or ideological objection to licensing if it delivers a specific, defined, achievable and measurable benefit. I fear that the Bill is about to create a regulatory web in which all the players—tenants, landlords, regeneration agencies and local authorities—will become hopelessly enmeshed. We look to the Minister to unravel its operations in Committee before it unravels in the country at large. The Minister reaffirmed the Government's commitment to the right to buy. We never quite believed their commitment because they forced it out through clenched teeth and took an awful long time to make it. It is worth recalling, as is stated in the Housing Corporation's report on affordable homes, that 1.5 million people and families have managed to own their own home through the process and 50,000 people a year are still doing so. The merits of the scheme, as spelled out by the Housing Corporation, are that it is accessible, simple and easily understood and that it operates easily. The Barker report, which is a systematic indictment of the Government's failure to deliver even minimum levels of affordable and social housing, should perhaps be delivered in juxtaposition to the Minister's 20-minute prologue to his remarks about the Bill. I notice in this Government a wonderful tendency to elide the notions of affordable housing and social housing. They are not the same. Affordable housing is generally designed for people who want to purchase, perhaps through shared ownership, and social housing is for people who want to rent from a registered social landlord. I hope that the Government will maintain that distinction, rather than pretending that they are the same thing. Matthew Green : Before the right hon. Gentleman leaves the issue of social housing and registered social landlords, will he confirm whether it is still Conservative party policy to extend the right to buy to all RSL tenants? Mr. Curry: I notice in the Housing Corporation's report a recommendation that the right to buy ought to be extended across the social sectors because it is clearly unfair that somebody in a local authority house should have the right to buy and that, for a local authority house that has been transferred, the right to buy is carried with that transfer, whereas for a housing association property it is not, generally speaking, although there are some exceptions. We shall develop a policy that seeks to fulfil that objective of creating a level playing field, and the Housing Corporation has come up with some extremely sensible ideas for the way forward. Had it given more mechanisms on how to move forward, it would have been even more helpful. There are some fine aspirations in that report, but the mechanics need to be put in place. Dr. Brian Iddon (Bolton, South-East) (Lab): Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that his policy would allow RSL properties in rural villages to be sold? Mr. Curry: We have never sold RSL properties in villages. There has always been a prohibition on such sales in villages of fewer than 3,000 inhabitants. That was built into the very first right-to-buy proposals, and it would remain the case. I am a rural Member of Parliament, and I know precisely the problems of providing housing for local people. I support those measures that allow local authorities and social providers to limit access to people from the local community and to maintain that access. Mr. Steen : Is my right hon. Friend aware that, in rural areas such as south Devon, there is a shortage of greenfield land, the only area where there is any spare land to build houses, with the result that councils are not building on such sites? There is therefore great scarcity and prices are going up. The Government are failing because they cannot build affordable or social housing—scarcity leads to the prices rising too high. Mr. Curry: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. That is the problem everywhere. The Barker report says that 39,000 additional houses ought to be built every year, merely to keep up with population growth and household formation, and that is almost certainly an underestimate. The work was done by Shelter in co-operation with the Barker inquiry. Andrew Bennett (Denton and Reddish) (Lab): Do I take it from the right hon. Gentleman's advocacy of all this extra housing that he is prepared to reverse the policy of the Conservative party, which was critical of Labour, claiming that we were going to concrete over the green belt? Is he now committing himself to putting all those new houses into the green belt? Mr. Curry: Nobody is talking about the green belt. We all recognise that there is a major demand for property. We know that it comes from a number of sources, one of which is household formation—that is sociology. Immigration in south-east England causes a significant demand for housing because people are spilling out of London into the region. We also know that in the major metropolitan areas, with the possible exception of Leeds—it depends whether the census people have got their facts right—people are spilling out of the centre into the suburbs. I do not dispute the fact that there is a significant demand. The question is how and where we meet that demand. The idea that demand in London and the south-east is created by people from Yorkshire and Lancashire marching down the M1 or the A1 with soot or snow on their boots is entirely illusory; indeed, sane people are moving in the opposite direction. The Government claim that the measures in the Bill will have no impact on the volume of sales. The explanatory notes, which are normally almost as incomprehensible as the Bill itself, state on page 61, at paragraph 361: "There will be a limited effect on public expenditure. The number of sales under the scheme is unlikely to be affected." I have to say that I treat that with a degree of scepticism. The changes
to the discount already implemented may well have stopped the right to
buy in its tracks in London—it remains to be seen whether that is
so—and the Bill's other measures, including the extension of the
qualifying period, a consequence of which is that discounts are repayable
in the event of resale within that period, add to a significantly steeper
barrier to right to buy. Ms Oona King (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab): May I reiterate the incredible problems that the right to buy has caused in areas such as Tower Hamlets? Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that extending the policy to housing associations, for example, would involve additional public subsidy of about £1 billion? Where would that money be found? Mr. Curry: I really do not think that the hon. Lady has got it right in this instance. The people who produced the Housing Corporation report were not a bunch of card-carrying Conservatives, and one of the clear points they made in the report was that we had to consider some means by which we could create equal conditions across the social field. That is especially important given that the burden of development of social housing has passed from local authorities, and may pass from housing associations as well under the Government's proposals to bring in private developers, albeit into schemes that, I suspect, will be managed by housing associations. It therefore makes sense to search for a reasonable way in which housing opportunities can be made more generally available. Is the right hon. Gentleman not aware of the vast ongoing scandal whereby council properties are bought under right to buy with money loaned to the tenants, then rented out at exorbitant rates to people, many of whom are entitled to housing benefit and whose rents are paid by the public? Does he not think that someone who exercises their right to buy should be limited to renting out the property for no more than the council or housing association would have rented it out for? Mr. Curry: I have already said that in so far as the measures are designed to stop such practices, I support them. I am not in the business of promoting manipulation or abuse of the system—I want people's natural and normal aspirations to be fulfilled. I said that we would support the Government in so far as they are trying to deal with abuses. David Wright (Telford) (Lab): The right hon. Gentleman mentioned how he would like to standardise the right-to-buy regime across the social housing sectors. Does he think that we should standardise the discount regime as well? Mr. Curry: The hon. Gentleman is using standardise" falsely. I want people to have opportunities across the right-to-buy spectrum. Those may well be equivalent opportunities—
The Minister may recall that when we were in government we toyed with the idea of introducing a social housing grant for private sector developers, but did not proceed. The Government believe that housing associations have grown lazy on the fat of the land and are failing on output, productivity and value for money. One only has to talk to people in the sector to realise that that message is coming over loud and clear, particularly from the Treasury. The idea is that the private sector will be brought in, particularly because of the need to meet targets in the communities plan. The measure must be seen against the background of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill and the introduction of a tariff system to commute section 106 agreements into cash payments. After all, the majority of social housing is the result of planning gain. Registered social landlords and housing associations fear that private developers will build on easy sites, many of which will be in the green belt, such as areas around Milton Keynes, undermining their ability to recycle surpluses from, for example, shared ownership into social housing construction. Housing associations and the private sector are developing partnerships in which developers have responsibility for the land and housing associations grant and management functions. They are working together effectively, especially in areas where land values are high, within the framework of section 106. As with much of the Housing Bill, a great deal depends on the detail of how it works. Can section 106 agreements be replaced across the board with cash or tariff payments, or is the intention that section 106 wil remain a requirement for social housing provision? There is a lack of clarity about what is intended in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill, but it is crucial that we know whether section 106 agreements can be replaced in principle with a cash payment at the demand of a developer or whether local authorities can insist that a quota of social housing be met when private developers are given planning permission? The full debate can be read on Parliament's Website: Hansard for 12 January 2004 >> |
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David Curry MP | House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA | tel: 020 7219 6202 |
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