Social Housing Bill [Lords]
It is a pleasure to speak opposite the new Minister, with whom I very much enjoyed working on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. Now that she is on the Government Front Bench, I suppose it is left to me to ask the tough questions. The Government have said that the Bill has been designed to encourage social housing providers to invest in the building of new socially rented homes. They want to encourage councils to build by restricting right to buy. That is the wrong approach. Yes, waiting lists for councils homes are far too high, but making it harder for tenants to get on in life and escape the clutches of the public sector is not the right solution. Instead, Ministers should look at what their policies are doing. Despite their promises, Labour is going backwards on house building. As our reasoned amendment states, last year there were “12,810 fewer net additional dwellings delivered in England compared to the previous year”. Why are the Government not pledging to take on the developers, who are sitting on thousands of unbuilt planning applications? The Institute for Public Policy Research—Labour’s favourite think-tank—has found that 1.4 million homes have been left unbuilt since 2007, despite planning permission being granted. The figure of 1.4 million homes sounds rather close to the Government’s challenging target of 1.5 million new homes. People are fed up with the eyesores in their neighbourhood—levelled ground left abandoned, surrounded by hoardings. I can show the Minister many examples in my Broxbourne constituency, and I am sure that hon. Members from right across the House can do the same. Taking on the land-banking developers would have widespread public support, but this Government only seem interested in making it easier to build on the green belt. We are still waiting for them to reveal what action they are taking to speed up building following the consultations held more than 12 months ago, so there is clearly no urgency. The Government should also consider who should be eligible for the help of a social home. People who come to this country and wish to live here should not rely on the generosity of taxpayers. Making Britain your home should be earned by working hard and integrating; it should not come with a free ride on the benefits system. That is why the Conservative party will end social housing tenancies for foreign nationals. Ensuring that only UK nationals can access social housing would free up 230,000 homes for British families. That change would make an immediate and significant difference to those stuck on council house waiting lists, but the Government would prefer that they sit around waiting for the Bill. Sadly, this Government, and especially their Back Benchers, are blinded by their ideological dislike of right to buy. It is clearly—[Interruption.] A number of Members have asked where Conservative Members were today. As I said in a Westminster Hall debate, Members of Parliament have a lot to deal with. When we do surgeries in our constituencies and people say, “When I turn on the TV, I see hardly anyone in the Chamber,” we all explain why that is. I suspect there will be times when all hon. Members cannot make it to important debates that their constituents want them to attend. It is clearly the view of Labour Members that if we had no right to buy, social housing waiting lists would disappear, but where do they think the 2 million families that have utilised the scheme would be without it? Well, I can tell them: they would probably be in the same home, but it would be subsidised by the taxpayer rather than privately owned. Abolishing right to buy is not the silver bullet that they think it is. The Government are placing huge burdens on social housing providers to help Ministers meet their own net zero targets. The cost of complying with new energy regulations is causing significant pressure, and getting 713,000 homes up to minimum energy efficiency standards is estimated to cost £4.5 billion. The Chartered Institute of Housing told the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee that housing associations do not want to buy properties with gas boilers because they know that it will cost them more money to strip them out and make properties energy efficient. That is pushing up council house waiting lists. The National Housing Federation is clear about what that means: spending billions to comply with net zero regulations will make it harder to build new homes. Ministers already know this, as they reduced energy efficiency targets for social housing in January on the basis that providers could not build new homes because of the financial burden of upgrading their existing stock. If Ministers want councils to be incentivised to build, entirely getting rid of those expensive regulations would be a good place to start. What is positive in the Bill is the review of the shared ownership scheme, and I hope the Minister, when she gets to her feet, can confirm that the Government intend to keep that review in the Bill. This obligation was added by the Government only due to the diligent work of the Conservative team in the other place. I have lived in a shared ownership property, and I know that—as for other forms of ownership, such as leasehold—reforms are desperately needed to fix the many problems residents face. The Opposition agree that the provisions to protect victims of domestic violence are needed, but a separate legislative measure would have been the right way to bring those forward. I gently say to the many hon. Members who have made impassioned speeches that, when I was a council leader, I had a number of meetings with housing providers and housing associations, and not once in the hundreds of hours of meetings I had with social housing providers did they say to me that they could not build new social homes in Broxbourne, or in fact across the country, because of the right to buy. It was never mentioned as a reason why housing associations are not building social homes.