Category: Housing

Catherine West – 2022 Speech on Private Rental Price Increases

The speech made by Catherine West, the Labour MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, in the House of Commons on 14 January 2022.

I called for this debate, and was successful thanks to the Speaker’s office, following the recent shocking treatment of a group of residents in my constituency by their landlord, which brought insecurities in the private rented sector into sharp focus. In November last year, I was contacted by several residents living in a block of flats in Hornsey and Wood Green. After their building was sold to a new landlord, they received either section 21 notices to evict them or section 13 notices saying that their rent was set to soar by an eye-watering 30% to 40%.

Those tenants included families who had lived there for decades and they were understandably devastated at the thought of losing their homes. Like me, they could not understand how an increase on that scale could ever be justified or how a landlord could kick out reliable long-standing tenants for no reason in the middle of a pandemic.

I am pleased to say that, following weeks of representations by my office to the new owners, the threat of adverse publicity in our local campaigning newspaper and the help of the charity Shelter and local Hornsey Labour councillors, I learned this week that the new owners had rescinded some of those notices and offered tenants new contracts on more favourable terms. Although that is welcome news for most residents, sadly, for some of them, the landlord’s change of heart two months after the notices were dispatched has come much too late.

This example highlights the huge power imbalance between private landlords and their tenants, which is currently upheld by existing housing legislation. That is why I am urging the Government to end section 21 notices, as they committed in their 2019 general election manifesto. I am asking the Minister to provide an answer today on when the renters’ reform Bill, promised in the Queen’s Speech, will be introduced.

In that block of flats in my constituency, seven households were issued with section 21 notices, which enable private landlords to repossess their properties from assured shorthold tenants without having to establish fault on the part of the tenant. Such measures are sometimes informally referred to as no-fault evictions. Many of those householders have lived in their flats for several years, in some cases decades, and are raising their families there.

One family who were issued with a section 21 notice have been renting their flat since 1991. They raised their daughter there and, now in their 60s, cannot afford a mortgage, because in that period, as the Minister will understand, the average price of a property in a place such as Hornsey and Wood Green has sky-rocketed. After the family challenged their landlord over the notice, they were told that their only other option was to accept a 40% rent increase.

Another resident whose family were issued with a section 21 notice after living in their flat for five years explained that his family had been left in an extremely difficult and precarious situation. To make matters worse, those notices were issued in mid-November, with section 21 notice recipients expected to find a new home and move over the Christmas period in the midst of a global pandemic. When challenged on that, the new managing agent for the block said that there was no good time to serve a section 21 notice. He is right, but there are some very bad times, and that was one of them.

Many other tenants in the blocks were issued with section 13 notices of rent rises of up to 40% with as little as four weeks’ notice. One of those residents explained to me that when she moved into her flat as a single parent, she enjoyed the sense of community in the block, which is home to a number of families. The landlord’s aggressive move to increase her rent by 30% to £2,000 per calendar month for a two-bedroom flat in Hornsey would have made it impossible for her to pay.

The only recourse available to those who receive section 13 notices is to refer them to a tribunal. However, this process can be lengthy, complex, time-consuming and a waste of public funds, particularly for those struggling to access expert advice. Moreover, there is nothing to stop landlords subsequently issuing a section 21 notice if the tribunal decision does not go in their favour. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who has worked with tenants and landlords to develop a new and fairer tenancy model—the London model—has called on the Government to reform court processes to make it easier for renters to challenge rent increases and eviction notices. He wholeheartedly supports this Adjournment debate.

Particularly given the Tory household budget crisis, it is an injustice that any landlord should be able to behave in this way. When I contacted Shelter for advice, I was told there is nothing to prevent private owners deciding to take possession on a large scale like this, even during a global pandemic and on the eve of Christmas.

Living with that level of uncertainty can be detrimental to the wellbeing of our community. Shelter’s survey of private renters in 2021 found that 39% said their housing problems or worries left them feeling stressed and anxious, and many parents have reported to Shelter that the insecurity of renting makes it harder for their children to settle. Living in homes on short, fixed-term contracts with the threat of eviction or a looming unaffordable rent hike makes planning for the future extremely difficult. Frequent moves are not only expensive but disruptive to employment and children’s education.

Living in constant fear of eviction also makes renters less likely to report disrepair problems, which is an issue I see all too frequently in my constituency, where 17,000 households are privately renting. Shockingly, a quarter of privately rented homes do not meet the decent homes standard, with 14% having a category 1 hazard that poses a very significant safety concern.

Although there are some actions the local authority can take to ensure landlords address the most serious disrepair, Citizens Advice found that private renters who make a formal complaint to their local authority have a 46% chance of being served with an eviction notice within six months, which is a severe deterrent to reporting disrepair to the local authority.

Eleven million people, including 1 million children, are now living in rented accommodation. In the past this was just a short-term option before one purchased a home or before one was able to get on a housing list. Now, with 11 million people living in privately rented accommodation in the UK, this has become an urgent issue. The number is expected to grow in the coming years, with 40% of London’s households expected to be living in the private rented sector by 2025. This is no way for the city’s inhabitants to live.

The last piece of comprehensive legislation affecting the private rented sector was introduced in 1988, when the number was far lower. With a growing number of people affected across the country, the Government need to act urgently. First, when will the renters’ reform Bill be brought to the House? Secondly, when will the Government live up to their promise to build more genuinely affordable homes? By that I mean homes with rent at the level of council rents so that people can afford to save while renting and can get on to the housing ladder if they wish to do so later.

Everyone has the right to a safe and secure home. It is shameful that, three years after promising to end no-fault evictions, renters such as my constituents in Hornsey and Wood Green are still living with the fear of being made homeless by their landlord due to this Government’s failure to act. I urge the Minister to address these concerns, which are shared by so many in my constituency, across London and across the UK—11 million people are affected in the UK.

17/01/2022
Sadiq Khan – 2022 Comments on Temporary Visas for Construction Workers

The comments made by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, on 13 January 2022.

Tackling London’s housing crisis has always been one of my top priorities since becoming Mayor. We’ve worked tirelessly over the last five years to get London building again, and the construction sector forms a key part of London’s Covid recovery plan. However, both our recovery and efforts to deliver the genuinely affordable homes Londoners desperately need could now be put at risk if there isn’t the skilled workforce available to build them.

The Government must look beyond their current blinkered approach to immigration and recognise the impending crisis that is already enveloping one of our most vital industries.

Training our own people to take on jobs in the construction sector is an admirable aim and one we’re working hard to meet but in the meantime, we need skilled tradespeople on site now to manage the short-term crisis and build a strong recovery.

16/01/2022
Lisa Nandy – 2022 Speech on Building Safety

The speech made by Lisa Nandy, the Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, in the House of Commons on 10 January 2022.

May I thank you, Mr Speaker, for your kind words about Jack Dromey, who should have been with us here today? There is a space over there that I know Jack would have occupied. Back in the 1970s, horrified by the spectacle of a skyscraper in London that lay empty while people slept rough underneath it, Jack was one of those who occupied Centre Point tower in protest. He was never afraid to speak truth to power, and I hope that today marks the start of all of us across the House invoking his spirit.

Four and a half years after the appalling tragedy at Grenfell, and with a road paved with broken promises and false dawns, hundreds of thousands are still trapped in unsafe homes, millions are caught in the wider crisis, and the families of 72 people who lost their lives are waiting for justice. It is a relief that we finally have a consensus that the developers and manufacturers who profited from this appalling scandal should bear greater costs, not the victims, and that blameless leaseholders must not pay. After a year of hell of the prospect hanging over leaseholders, we welcome the decision to remove the threat of forced loans, but can the Secretary of State tell us what makes him think that he can force developers, who have refused to do the right thing for four years, to pay up? We have been told there is a March deadline and a roundtable, but there is not a plan. If he has one, can we hear it? He will find an open door on the Opposition side of the House, if he has a credible proposal to bring.

Today the Secretary of State warned developers that if negotiation fails,

“our backstop…what we can do…is increase taxation on those responsible”,

but that is not quite right, is it? I have in front of me the letter from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. May I remind the Secretary of State what it says? He was told that

“you may use a high-level ‘threat’ of tax or legal solutions in discussions with developers”

but

“whether or not to impose or raise taxes remains a decision for me”

—the Chief Secretary—

“and is not a given at this point.”

If I have seen the letter, I am fairly sure that the developers have too. Furthermore, it appears that what the Secretary of State has told the public—that tax rises are the backstop—is not what he has told the Treasury. The letter says that

“you have confirmed separately that DLUHC budgets are a backstop for funding these proposals in full…should sufficient funds not be raised from industry.”

That is not what the Secretary of State told the House a moment ago, so can he clear this up? Has the Chancellor agreed to back a new tax measure if negotiations fail, or is the Secretary of State prepared to see his already allocated budgets—levelling-up funding, or moneys for social or affordable housing—raided? Or is his plan to go back to the Treasury, renegotiate and legislate, if he fails in March? If that is the case, it will take months, and there is nothing to stop freeholders passing on the costs to leaseholders in the meantime. Does he even have an assessment of how many leaseholders will be hit with whacking great bills if he delays?

If the Secretary of State is serious about going after the developers—I hope that he is—why is he not putting these powers into the Building Safety Bill now? The only trick that he has up his sleeve, as he just confirmed to the House, is to ban them from Help to Buy, and we know that the impact of that, though welcome, will be marginal. Can he see the problem? He will also know that there is a gaping hole in what he has proposed. A significant number of buildings have both cladding and non-cladding defects, and leaseholders in them face ruinous costs to fix things such as missing fire breaks and defective compartmentation. One cannot make a building half safe. Given that the Secretary of State recognises the injustice of all leaseholders caught up in the building safety crisis, why is he abandoning those who have been hit with bills for non-cladding defects, and why will he not amend his Bill so that all leaseholders are protected from historical defects in law?

The truth is that the pace of remediation has been painfully slow. The Secretary of State is now on track to miss the deadline to fix all Grenfell-style cladding by over half a decade, and there are huge delays when it comes to building safety fund applications, so will he get a grip on what is going on in his own Department and ensure that the progress of remediation is accelerated markedly? As he knows, this has been a living nightmare for affected leaseholders, and we owe it to them to bring it swiftly to an end.

What the Secretary of State has given us today is a welcome shift in tone and some new measures that the Opposition very much hope will succeed, but the harder I look at this, the less it stands up. We were promised justice and we were promised change, to finally do right by the victims of this scandal, and that takes more than more promises. It takes a plan.

11/01/2022
Michael Gove – 2022 Statement on Building Safety

The statement made by Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Housing, in the House of Commons on 10 January 2022.

With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to update the House on building safety. Before I do so, I can confirm that I have asked the permanent secretary in my Department to conduct a leak inquiry. It was a matter of considerable regret to me that details of the statement that I am about to make were shared with the media before they were shared with Members of this House, and indeed with those most affected.

It is worth pausing at the start of any statement to reflect on why building safety is an issue of concern to all of us in this House today. It took the tragedy at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017, as a result of which 72 innocent men, women and children lost their lives, to put building safety properly on the political agenda. Families were living in a building that was literally a death trap because of failures of enforcement and compliance in our building safety regime. This Government must take their share of responsibility for those failures.

Over four years on from that terrible tragedy, it is clear that the building safety system remains broken. The problems that we have to fix have been identified by many across this House, from all parties. I would like at this point to register my appreciation of the work that the late Jack Dromey did on this issue. He was shadow Housing Minister for three years and he did a great deal, both as a trade unionist and as the Member of Parliament for Birmingham, Erdington, to bring to light the plight of those affected by this crisis.

As we know, there are still a small number of high-rise buildings with dangerous and unsafe cladding that have to be fixed. We know that those who manufacture dangerous products and develop dangerous buildings have faced inadequate accountability so far, and shown insufficient contrition. We also need to ensure that we take a proportionate approach in building assessments overall. There are too many buildings today that are declared unsafe, and there are too many who have been seeking to profit from the current crisis.

Most importantly, leaseholders are shouldering a desperately unfair burden. They are blameless, and it is morally wrong that they should be the ones asked to pay the price. I am clear about who should pay the price for remedying failures. It should be the industries that profited, as they caused the problem, and those who have continued to profit, as they make it worse.

Mr Speaker, we will take action on all of these fronts. To ensure that every remaining high-rise dangerous building has the necessary cladding remediation to make it safe, we will open up the next phase of the building safety fund early this year and focus relentlessly on making sure it is risk driven and delivered more quickly.

We will also ensure that those who profited, and continue to profit, from the sale of unsafe buildings and construction products must take full responsibility for their actions and pay to put things right. Those who knowingly put lives at risk should be held to account for their crimes, and those who are seeking to profit from the crisis by making it worse should be stopped from doing so.

Today, I am putting them on notice. To those who mis-sold dangerous products, such as cladding or insulation, to those who cut corners to save cash as they developed or refurbished people’s homes, and to those who sought to profiteer from the consequences of the Grenfell tragedy: we are coming for you. I have established a dedicated team in my Department to expose and pursue those responsible. We will begin by reviewing Government schemes and programmes to ensure that, in accordance with due process, there are commercial consequences for any company that is responsible for this crisis and refusing to help to fix it.

In line with this, just before Christmas, I instructed Homes England to suspend Rydon Homes, which is closely connected to the company that refurbished the Grenfell Tower, from its participation in the Help to Buy scheme, with immediate effect. I also welcome the decision by the Mercedes Formula 1 team and Toto Wolff to discontinue sponsorship from Kingspan, the cladding firm, with immediate effect. The voices of the families of the bereaved and the survivors of the Grenfell Tower were heard, but this is only the start of the action that must be taken.

We must also restore common sense to the assessment of building safety overall. The Government are clear—we must find ways for there to be fewer unnecessary surveys. Medium-rise buildings are safe, unless there is clear evidence to the contrary. There must be far greater use of sensible mitigations, such as sprinklers and fire alarms, in place of unnecessary and costly remediation work.

To achieve that, today I am withdrawing the Government’s consolidated advice note. It has been wrongly interpreted and has driven a cautious approach to building safety in buildings that are safe that goes beyond what we consider necessary. We are supporting new, proportionate guidance for assessors, developed by the British Standards Institution, which will be published this week.

Secondly, we will press ahead with the building safety fund, adapting it so that it is consistent with our proportionate approach. We will now set a higher expectation that developers must fix their own buildings, and we will give leaseholders more information at every stage of the process.

Thirdly, before Easter, we will be implementing our scheme to indemnify building assessors conducting external wall assessments, giving them the confidence to exercise their balanced professional judgment. We will audit those assessments to ensure that expensive remediation is being advised only where it is necessary to remove a threat to life.

I will be working closely with lenders over the coming months to improve market confidence, and I have asked my colleague Lord Greenhalgh to work with insurers on new industry-led approaches that bring down the premiums facing leaseholders.

Further, we will take the power to review the governance of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, to ensure that it is equipped properly to support a solution to this challenge. Those in the industry who refuse to work with us in good faith to take a more proportionate approach should be clear that our determination is to fix the problem for all those caught up in this crisis.

Finally, we must relieve the burden that has been unfairly placed on leaseholders. I want to pay tribute to all those across the House who have campaigned so passionately on this subject. They know the injustice of asking leaseholders, often young people who have saved hard and made sacrifices to take their first steps on the housing ladder, to pay money they do not have to fix a problem they did not cause, all while the firms who made a profit on those developments sit on their hands. We will take action to end the scandal and protect leaseholders. We will scrap the proposal for loans and long-term debt for medium-rise leaseholders.

I can confirm to the House today that no leaseholder living in a building above 11 metres will ever face any costs for fixing dangerous cladding and, working with Members of both Houses, we will pursue statutory protection for leaseholders and nothing will be off the table. As part of that, we will introduce immediate amendments to the Building Safety Bill to extend the right of leaseholders to challenge those who cause defects in premises for up to 30 years retrospectively.

We will also take further action immediately: we will provide an additional £27 million to fund more fire alarms, so we can end the dreadful misuse of waking watches; we will change grant funding guidance so that shared owners affected by the crisis can more easily sub-let their properties, and encourage lenders and landlords to approve sub-letting arrangements; and in the period before long-term arrangements are put in place, I will work with colleagues across Government to make sure that leaseholders are protected from forfeiture and eviction because of historic costs. Innocent leaseholders must not shoulder the burden.

We have already committed £5.1 billion of taxpayers’ funding from the Government, but we should not now look to the taxpayer for more funding. We should not ask hard-working taxpayers to pay more taxes to get developers and cladding companies making vast profits off the hook. We will make industry pay to fix all of the remaining problems and help to cover the range of costs facing leaseholders. Those who manufactured combustible cladding and insulation, many of whom have made vast profits even at the height of the pandemic, must pay now instead of leaseholders.

We have made a start through the residential property developer tax and the building safety levy, both announced last February, but will now go further. I will today write to developers to convene a meeting in the next few weeks, and I will report back to the House before Easter. We will give them the chance to do the right thing. I hope that they will take it. I can confirm to the House today that if they do not, we will impose a solution on them, if necessary, in law.

Finally, we must never be in this position again, so we are putting the recommendations of the Hackitt review on building safety in law and we will shortly commence the Fire Safety Act 2021. We are also today publishing new collaborative procurement guidance on removing the incentives for industry to cut corners and to help stop the prioritisation of cost over value. We will legislate to deliver broader reforms to the leasehold system, and also bring forward measures to fulfil commitments made in the social housing White Paper. When parliamentary time allows, we will have legislation on social housing regulation so that social housing tenants cannot be ignored as those in the Grenfell community were for many years.

Four and a half years on from the tragedy of Grenfell, it is long past time that we fix the crisis. Through the measures that I have set out today, we will seek redress for past wrongs and secure funds from developers and construction product manufacturers, and we will protect leaseholders today and fix the system for the future.

11/01/2022
Lindsay Hoyle – 2022 Statement on Michael Gove’s Department Leaking Information to Media

The statement made by Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, in the House on 10 January 2022.

Before I call the Secretary of State to make his statement, I have to express once again my disappointment that important announcements have been made first to the media, rather than to this House. In this case, I accept that issues of market sensitivity meant that announcements had to be made this morning. However, I am told that the announcements were required because of speculation about the policy change over the weekend. That speculation appears to have been substantially accurate, which means that the media appear to have known the details before this House did. If that is the case, I would be grateful if the Secretary of State could confirm that a leak inquiry is to be held.

11/01/2022
Rebecca Pow – 2022 Comments about Housing Projects and the Environment

The comments made by Rebecca Pow, the Environment Minister, on 10 January 2022.

The pandemic has reinforced how much our homes, communities and outdoor spaces mean to us. Our commitment to protecting and enhancing our natural world can and must go hand in hand with our ambition to build more high quality homes.

Our plans to make sure new developments better protect and enhance wildlife and nature will create better places for people to live and work, and it will ensure we leave our environment in a better state for future generations.

11/01/2022
Justin Madders – 2022 Speech on New Homes and Management Companies

The speech made by Justin Madders, the Labour MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston, in the House of Commons on 5 January 2022.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Betts. Happy new year to everyone who is here today. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wantage (David Johnston) on securing the debate, on his useful introduction and on the interesting points he made. This may be the first debate of 2022 and it may be a new year, but, as we have heard, many of the issues we are debating are not new and, aside from the leasehold scandal, have had insufficient attention from this place.

We absolutely need more places for people to live; I doubt there is a Member in this place who disagrees with that. While the Government set some general targets about how many homes should be built, the detail is rightly left, in the main, to local councils. In reality, they and the communities they represent have limited say over what sort of homes are built, where they are built and, as the hon. Member for Wantage mentioned, how the infrastructure that goes with them is delivered. That is the nub of the problem, because we are often told that the wrong type of home is being built in the wrong type of place. That can be argued ad infinitum, and it often is. The bottom line is that we are continually falling short in achieving enough decent affordable housing.

Decent housing is critical to the national infrastructure. It is the bedrock of people’s lives, yet it is too often left to the market to resolve, and the market is clearly failing. In my experience, developers all too often show contempt for local communities by riding roughshod over the development conditions imposed on them: working longer hours, making more noise, and building higher and closer than they should to existing properties. That creates more work for the beleaguered planning department and puts more demands on councils that, after a decade of austerity, simply do not have the powers and resources to keep up.

By the time the council manages to catch up with a complaint, quite often the house is already built and the drains put in. It is a massive financial, logistical and legal battle to get developers to stick to plans when they have got that far down the road. Many councils simply do not have the capacity to get into such fights, especially when the case is about a couple of metres. It might not look much on a plan, but for someone living next door, a couple of metres makes a huge difference.

What about roads being brought up to an acceptable standard, so that they can be adopted by the local authority? People are waiting years for roads to be adopted. I do not blame the local authority, which sets out what needs to be done but does not have the resources or time to continually chase developers who have sold the homes and moved on. Where is the incentive for developers to come back and finish the job they started?

I want to say a few words about the massive expansion of estate management companies. It seems that the idea of the developer paying the local authority a commuted sum to cut the grass and maintain common parts has had its day. This reduces developers’ costs, although it does not seem to lead to cheaper house prices. It costs the homeowner far more in the long run because they are, in effect, paying twice for the maintenance of open spaces: once through a management fee and once through their council tax. Once again, though, it is the council that gets lumbered with all the grief and blame.

With developers looking to replace their lost funding streams, with what I hope will be the end of leasehold, I am concerned that estate management companies will become the new payment protection insurance of the house building industry. There is little regulation or transparency and, if we are honest, little need for estate management companies in most settings, so why do we have them? House builders build houses—that is their core business; they are not interested in managing estates. Indeed, they cannot wait to get rid of them to a company that specialises in such things.

Developers creating an estate management company is nothing more than a calculation on the balance sheet. They have zero interest in keeping the verges neat and tidy after they have gone. If they can make the bottom line look more attractive by getting in a management company, they will. They keep getting away with it because we let them. Why can we not start from the basic principle that the local council should be doing those jobs and that estate management companies are an unnecessary tax on homeowners? How many people are told of the implications of an estate management company or how much it costs?

What developers say to new buyers in the showroom and what is in the final contract are often very different. By the time the paperwork arrives, it is too late. People may have spent thousands on the move, never mind the psychological commitment they have made. What is said in the showroom often does not appear in any documentation. There is a classic example in my constituency where residents now look out on a 30-feet-high warehouse, which the developers conveniently forgot to mention already had planning permission when they sold buyers their homes. They are still waiting for the KFC that they were told was going to be there. Because that is just sales patter, there is no legal accountability for the lies that are told.

This is the biggest single purchase people will ever make. There needs to be far greater accountability for what developers say and what they build. At the moment, they seem to have a free pass. Developers with household names work across the country, moving from one project to the next, sometimes leaving behind problems that take years to resolve. Another development in my constituency has ended up in court, with one group of residents pitted against another and maintenance bills racking up in their thousands, because the developers did not do the paperwork or the job properly in the first place. I know that they are causing havoc elsewhere, because other hon. Members have told me. What can councils do? They have no grounds to refuse planning permission on the basis that the developer has been a poor performer elsewhere. How about a fit and proper person test for the directors of those companies?

In conclusion, I would like much greater political direction and oversight of the house building industry. After all, it will build the homes that we need, but at the moment it quite understandably organises affairs to maximise profits. Housing is a critical part of our infrastructure—having a roof over one’s head is fundamental—but it has been shown time and again that we cannot rely on the market alone to deliver that. Four and a half years on from Grenfell, we still have not really had a decision on who is liable for the defects that were created there, and there is clearly a reluctance in Government to grasp the nettle and take some ownership of the industry.

05/01/2022
David Johnston – 2022 Speech on New Homes and Management Companies

The speech made by David Johnston, the Conservative MP for Wantage, in the House of Commons on 5 January 2022.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the role of developers, housebuilders and management companies in new homes.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. Happy new year to you and to everybody else who is here this morning. This is a 90-minute debate, and I have said to quite a number of people that I could easily speak for at least 90 minutes on this topic—it will be a relief to everyone that I am not going to do that. The reason is that it is a source of huge frustration in my constituency. Owning a new home and the development of new homes should be a source of great joy, but too often it is a source of great distress. There are a few reasons for that that I want to talk about, but before I go into those, I want to say at the outset that, contrary to some of the media stereotypes about areas such as mine, most people in my constituency are not opposed to new homes. If they are homeowners themselves, they entirely understand why other people want to own a home. They often have children and grandchildren whom they are trying to help get on the housing ladder. They know that we need housing for key workers. They know that sometimes people just want to move into one of these new homes from where they already live in the constituency. But people have real frustration with the way in which these things are developing and the problems they are causing in the local area.

The first issue is simply the quality of a lot of the homes that go up, because it is often poor. Sometimes it is very good, but too often it is poor, and constituents’ homes have major defects that take years to try to deal with. I have constituents who have spent two, three or four years—sometimes more—trying to get these defects repaired. This is not like buying a cheap version of something on eBay, half-expecting that there might be something wrong with it. This is the biggest purchase that any of us will make, and we do not expect to then have years of trying to sort out the problems with it. Unfortunately, when constituents try to do that, they feel completely outmatched by the builder that built their home. Sometimes the builder will blame the contractor; sometimes they will say that there is nothing wrong: “We signed it off according to building regulations.” But I have been in some of these places and we can see these huge issues. It is completely unacceptable that people are experiencing them.

The second issue is about the impact of these homes on the environment. That has two major aspects to it. One is what it does to the local environment around the area. Naturally, people can see greenfield sites disappearing. One constituent wrote to me and said that the biodiversity commitments that a particular house builder had made had not been kept whatsoever. There is an impact on air quality and water quality, but the other aspect is how the homes themselves are built. I am continually asked by constituents, “Why are we building so many homes that we know we will have to retrofit in a few years’ time?”, and there is no easy answer to that. I am continually asked, “Why can’t every new home have solar panels? Why can’t every new home have a heat pump?” I understand why: there are various reasons why we might not put the same thing in every kind of house.

I completely welcome the Government’s commitment to having electric charging points in every new home. I really welcome the future homes standard, which will make new homes from 2025 net zero ready, with a 75% reduction in their emissions. But the point still stands that thousands of homes are going up right now and we know that because of our ambitious net zero goals, we will have to retrofit a lot of them. The reason is that it is cheaper for the house builders to build them that way today.

The third issue is affordability. I have said a few times in this place that no one who rents has ever said to me, “There are too many new homes going up.” They say only that those homes are not affordable. They say that they have saved for years and years, and it does not matter how much they save; they do not get close to being able to afford one. The average house price in my constituency is £335,000. The average house price in my constituency is £335,000. To London ears that might sound fine, but it is 9.2 times median income, and that is out of reach for most people. An affordability threshold of 80% of that is still not affordable. Again, we run into bad practices. We all know that developers commit to a certain number of affordable homes, but time after time that number is driven down on the grounds that the development would not be viable if that commitment were maintained, so broken promises are a constant theme.

Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)

The hon. Gentleman makes a particularly important point about affordable housing. I am often told that developers who make such arguments about viability are working on a 20% profit margin per property. Does he agree that that is completely unsustainable?

David Johnston

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I was just about to say that when the taxpayer is subsidising the development of affordable homes and when the profits of house builders are so large—often bordering on 30%, come rain or shine; they are making these profits in all weathers—it is completely unacceptable for them to play this game so that people are unable to get on the housing ladder.

The fourth aspect that I want to talk about is the role of management companies. After someone has purchased one of these new homes, the costs do not always stop. People are often signed up to quite expensive contracts with management companies who purport to provide services to maintain communal areas, and it is often very difficult for residents to find out what is being done for that money. The charge goes up year after year, but their communal area is not maintained. They are told that staff are employed to do things, but they never see the staff. They work hard to try to get transparency about what is being provided for the money, but they cannot get it. They get a basic summary, and that is about it. The people who try to get the information are often well qualified, but they cannot get it.

I know of a management company—the residents do not want me to name them, so I will not—where many of the residents are elderly, sick or vulnerable, and they feel completely bullied and exploited by their management company. Right now they are being pressured into taking a new lease, which they do not want to take because they know it will be bad for them, but they fear the repercussions if they do not or if they go to someone to talk about it. They have talked to me, but, as I have said, they do not want to me to talk about who they are. That is an appalling situation for people to be in. Far too often there is a real problem with the way in which management companies fleece people in new homes when those people have already spent so much money.

Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. In preparing for it, I looked into leasehold in the United Kingdom. In England, Wales and Scotland, people are unable to buy their leasehold, but Northern Ireland is one part of the United Kingdom where they can. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that when it comes to purchasing the freehold, people certainly get a “fleecehold” in England, Wales and Scotland? In Northern Ireland they have a chance to buy it out. Does he feel that that should happen here on the mainland?

David Johnston

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I expect the Minister will address that point when he speaks later. Most people think that they own their home, but they can often end up feeling like tenants. I experienced that myself until recently. I used to get a bill for £300 on Christmas day every year. The bill, dated 25 December, was £300 for absolutely nothing, but constituents of mine are in a much worse situation.

The fifth aspect I want to talk about is the overall broken system in which the process operates. I do not blame the Government entirely. Councils have some responsibilities: if they do not enforce the planning conditions when developers go above the assessed numbers that they are supposed to build; and if they allow the same application to be made over and over again, when they could refuse it after two tries. They do not take a bigger-picture view. There are villages in my constituency, such as Sutton Courtenay, that feel hugely overdeveloped because individual applications are all being approved and nobody is looking at what is happening to the whole area and why it might not be a good idea to keep approving those applications.

Ultimately, these companies have to be held accountable for their behaviour. They apply for sites that they know the local plan does not allow them to apply for, as is happening in Grove, in my constituency. They continually try to build on flood plains. They continually fail to adhere to their section 106 agreements and community infrastructure levy agreements—sometimes not building infrastructure at all, and sometimes building pointless things, such as a pathway that goes only halfway across an estate or a bike path that leads to nowhere, just so they can say that they have done it. All those things are going on with new developments in my constituency. I do not blame Government for it all, but it is the Government’s job to ensure that the system does not operate in that way.

If I had to sum up the problems in my constituency, it would be, “Too many homes, too little infrastructure.” The two district councils that my constituency covers are, relative to their size, in the top 10 areas for house building in the country, yet they are in the bottom third for infrastructure spending. That is a huge bugbear. To put that in numerical context, an estimate of the population change between 2017 and 2027 found that the largest town and surrounding area in my constituency, Didcot, will increase from 36,000 to 51,000. The second largest area, Wantage and Grove, will increase from 17,000 to 27,000—that is in a 10-year period. Faringdon is getting thousands more people, and Wallingford is getting thousands more.

The infrastructure is not following that. It is harder to get a GP appointment, the roads in the constituency get more and more congested and it is harder to get a school place. One village has a 220-child school, and 300 houses have been built right next to it; just last year, the catchment area became less than 470 metres. People who have lived there for a long time and who expected their children to go to that school now cannot get in. When my constituents hear that planning reform may mean new houses and that they will not be able to oppose them, or that the Oxford-Cambridge arc may mean more houses, or that the council’s Oxfordshire 2050 plan may lead to more houses, they are not concerned out of nimbyism; they are concerned because of their experience, over many years, of so many houses being built and so many promises being broken.

To conclude, I will talk about a few things that I think should happen. There are lots of things, and there are plenty of experts in this room who I know will talk about other aspects. First, we need a much tougher regime for the quality of new buildings. I know that the new homes ombudsman will deal with some of these issues, but it is completely unacceptable to pay that much money and have that many problems. We need very tight quality conditions, and the threshold needs to be raised. If it is not met within a certain timeframe, there should be penalties; issues must not go on for years.

Secondly, we need “use it or lose it” planning permissions. I know that there are debates about how best to do this, and I am frequently written to about the 1 million permissions that have not been built on. I know that there is a debate about land banking and whether it happens; hon. Members would be hard pressed to persuade me that it does not, at least from the developers’ point of view. We in this place are familiar with the phrase “dig a trench.” The emphasis has been on starting the building: companies dig a trench to suggest that they have started building, and the houses then take years to appear. We need these homes to be completed within a certain period. If they are not, taxes might be levied or fines paid, but I think that the permission should be lost entirely.

Thirdly, I want to talk about environmental standards. If it takes several years for these houses to be built, they should be built to the latest environmental standards, not to those that existed when the developers got permission. That is what is happening at the moment: companies are building houses to an environmental standard of several years ago, when they should be building to a standard of the future. That needs to change.

We have got to make developers and house builders commit to their affordability criteria. Our big house builders are doing completely fine for profits for their own viability, so they cannot keep saying that developments would not be viable if they committed to what they originally promised.

When it comes to management companies, we need a much stricter regime, because the current one is very murky. Companies are getting away with appalling practices, bullying residents into things and fleecing them, year after year, for things that are not being provided. We need a tougher regime under which companies cannot keep hiking charges without an extraordinary set of circumstances. The charges often go up because of things the company itself has done and got wrong, and it passes the cost on to residents who had no say in the first place. Much more transparency is needed, and penalties for such bad behaviour.

I understand that house builders want a level playing field, because an individual company does not want to commit to expensive things if its rivals are not doing so. That is where there is a role for Government in raising standards, so that all house builders have to do the same. I want more of a level playing field for smaller companies, such as Greencore Construction in my constituency. Many such companies are more environmentally friendly and more efficient, and produce higher-quality homes, but they are often outbid by the financial muscle of the big boys. Perhaps we need to reserve a greater proportion of development sites for such companies or give them greater access to capital. I am all in favour of smaller organisations rather than larger ones—I ran small charities, not larger ones. I think we can get a better product from smaller house builders, and we need to help more such companies into the market.

My final point is that infrastructure needs to go in first. It is not right to pile more and more houses and people into an area, but to do nothing to support local services and infrastructure. I have been campaigning for Grove station to be reopened, for improvements on our roads and for better medical facilities. GP surgeries are bursting at the seams because thousands more people have been added to the area—Members have heard the numbers. GP surgeries and school places have not been added along with the people. Infrastructure must go in first. Unfortunately, over decades my constituents have been told too many times that the infrastructure will come with the houses, but it never has, and now they do not believe it. That has to come first. As part of that, we might better capture the land value increase that comes with planning permission. At the moment, the increase all goes to the owner. Some of it ought to go to the local community who will live with the new houses, not to the landowner who has sold the land.

The balance of power is wrong. Management companies, house builders and developers have too much power, and local residents have too little. The Government cannot be blamed for every single thing that a private company does, but they can help to restore the balance, so that local communities do not see new houses as a curse on the area they used to love.

05/01/2022
Harold Gurden – 1972 Speech on Home Ownership and Right to Buy

The speech made by Harold Gurden, the then Conservative MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, in the House of Commons on 18 January 1972.

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to extend to the tenants of dwellings owned by local authorities and other housing bodies the right to acquire the ownership or leasehold of their homes.

Public ownership of housing, extended as it has been over the years under both parties, with additional controls on building and other housing regulations, in the opinion of many people and many experts, has accentuated the housing shortage. Many of these regulations were designed to cure the housing shortage, but some of us believe that they have only made matters worse. The object of this Bill is to “denationalise” family homes. However much one believes in nationalisation as a principle, surely the family home should be exempt.

This is nationalisation in a most discriminatory form—against only the lower wage earners and the workers of this country, because the better-off can and do own their own homes. Few people, and fewer politicians, ever declare themselves opposed to the principle of a property-owning democracy. My own party has made this a very important part of its policy. Yet we have all allowed public authorities to deny nearly half Britain’s families the right to buy their homes.

These are the homes provided by the taxpayers and ratepayers by means of subsidy. It is true that some local authorities in control of council houses permit tenants to buy their homes, but they are not in the main enthusiastic about it and many local authorities do not allow tenants to do so. There are now millions of families in this category, and in future they may never be allowed to buy their own homes. This will affect families from one generation to the next.

This situation is clearly a class discrimination if ever there was one. It applies only to the lower income groups. Nearly all the higher income groups own their own homes. The tenant families and the working classes under both parties have had to accept constantly rising rents, and the Housing Finance Bill uses the Labour Party’s fair rent principle to increase the rents only partly to cover the cost to the tenant. So unless these tenants have the right freely to buy their own homes, they can never peg the cost of their home against inflation. The best way for a householder to insure himself against rising rents is to buy his home: it is better than a rise in wages.

Also to be considered is the pride of ownership in one’s own home, the incentives that there are to improve one’s property and enhance its value. The Government’s improvement grants are freely available and are used mostly by home owners. It is easy for most of us to recognise property which is owner-occupied as we go about the country. In Birmingham, in my own constituency in particular, urban deterioration is a serious problem, but was made less acute by home ownership. It is or should be an essential part of our policy to create home ownership if we are to defeat urban deterioration.

Another consideration is the mobility of labour. In our large cities, many unemployed are unable even to consider taking a job at the other side of the town, for the sole reason that they are municipal tenants and do not find it easy to move home. Changing a tenancy is far too slow and uncertain. If a job is offered to an unemployed man at the other side of a city as large as Birmingham, he has to think twice about accepting. I believe that many of our unemployed would not be restricted in their choice of job if they could sell their home and buy another.
I have carried out some research on this matter and the best estimate that I can make is that about 10 per cent. of the people in the home owner belt are mobile and do change their homes in any one year, whereas only about 2 per cent. of the people in council-owned properties move.

This leads one to assume that the security of tenure of having a municipal house is the main incentive, rather than employment. A man can easily get social security and unemployment pay, but he cannot easily get another house. This Bill is based on the Leasehold Reform Act, which was supported by both parties, to ensure specifically the right for people to own their own homes. The Bill carries this principle one stage further.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West (Mr. McLaren) initiated a debate just before the recess which was very valuable and saves me having to mention many of the facts of the situation which we should be considering and which I hope will be considered in debate.

Why should city councillors prevent home ownership? I am told that, in Bristol, an alderman voted against the city council allowing tenants to buy their homes, and after that vote went to the local authority and bought his own municipal house, before the city council could change the rules—

Mr. Charles Pannell (Leeds, West)

On a point of order. This cannot be in order, surely, in initiating a Ten-Minute Rule Bill, which has overstayed its time.

Mr. Speaker

These are matters for me.

Mr. Gurden

All I ask today is the right to debate this matter in the House. Any criticisms of the Bill—of its principle or any matters relating to it—can be debated at a later stage to the benefit of millions of people in this country.

30/12/2021
Liam Fox – 2016 Speech on Housing Pressures Caused by Migrants

The speech made by Liam Fox on 2 June 2016.

All across the country, local authorities are facing huge challenges to meet additional housing targets set by Central Government. Local communities are facing the loss of green spaces in the rush for housebuilding, often failing to take into account the limitations on existing infrastructure.

Take the village of Yatton, in my own constituency of North Somerset, for instance. Despite having no surplus school places, fully saturated GP surgeries and an already overstretched road system, it is typical of innumerable of villages across the country, where local communities are being asked to absorb large numbers of extra houses without any realistic possibility that the money will be found to provide the extra infrastructure required.

It is a story being repeated time and time again in more and more places. People rightly ask, “how much of our green space will disappear, possibly forever?” and “how much of our quality of life will be compromised to deal with problems often created far away?”

And they are right that the problem that is being faced at the local level begins well away from our communities at the level of national policy failure. It lies in the failure to control the growth of our population through immigration, including immigration from the European Union.

As the Government fails to control the increase in the population due to migration, it forces local authorities to build more and more houses to deal with the ripple effect.

If we remain in the European Union we will be forced to accept unlimited free movement of people – but there will be no free movement of space coming with them. The inevitable result will be worsening overcrowding in our land limited country.

Most of the focus in the housing debate has been on supply. There is a relatively broad consensus that the UK needs to build around 250,000 additional homes every year to meet current demand. In the last ten years an average of only 170,000 have been built and the debate has largely been around how changes to planning can facilitate the level of house building required.

Yet, what this approach to the problem fails to understand is that it is not merely an issue of supply, but one of demand.

For much of the 20th century, the number of households grew at a faster rate than the population as a whole. Changes in social behaviour, such as divorce and the increased tendency for people to live alone, as well as demographics, meant that the average household size fell. In recent times, however, average household size has changed little, and the key factor driving the growth in household numbers has been population growth.

The total non-British net inflow of immigrants is close to 350,000 with migration from the EU now accounting for about half of that figure.

The outcome of the recent renegotiation of benefits will make no significant difference to these numbers, as the office for budget responsibility, the government’s advisory body has confirmed.

This implies continued total net EU migration to the UK of the order of almost 200,000 people per annum.

This number is growing dramatically and has already more than doubled since 2012.

The continuing failure of the Eurozone and the tragically high levels of unemployment in Southern Europe is likely to mean that more and more young people will head to the North of Europe, including the UK, in search of work.

And all this does not include those countries who may join the EU in the coming years.

All these factors could considerably boost the numbers and we are powerless to stop it. Staying in the EU is likely to mean continued high levels of immigration over which the UK would have no control while leaving the EU would give back control of immigration policy to the UK government so enabling the number of immigrants to be reduced while, at the same time, being more selective about who can come to the UK.

Continuation of net migration on the current scale would mean an increase in our population of almost 5 million in 15 years’ time.

This would be the equivalent of adding the combined population of the cities of Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford and Bristol.

60% of this increase would be from future migrants and their children. This is not a scare story, simply an extrapolation of how today’s immigration figures will impact on our society in the years ahead if changes are not made to policy. Half of this huge figure is attributable to the EU.

Official figures show that in the last ten years, two thirds of additional households in the UK have been headed up by an immigrant (that is to say that they had a foreign born “Household Reference Person (HRP) – what used to be known as head of household) [c]. Households with a foreign born HRP have increased by around 120,000 a year during this period.

In London, despite the rapid growth in population the number of households headed by a British born person has actually fallen in the last ten years.

This is a particular problem in England which takes over 90% of immigrants to the UK despite the fact that it is is already nearly twice as crowded as Germany and 3½ times as crowded as France.

Yet population growth on the present scale means making our urban areas still more overcrowded or building over valuable green belt or farmland with all the loss of amenity involved.

At current levels of immigration, the Office for National Statistics project that our population will continue to grow by around half a million a year – a city the size of Liverpool every year.

This will mean that, in England, we will have to build a new home every six minutes, or 240 a day, for the next 20 years to accommodate just the additional demand for housing from new migrants. That is before we take into account the needs of those who were born here.

Of course, it would be wrong to imply that most newly built housing is occupied by immigrants. Many immigrant households move into existing properties. The need to build a new home every 6 minutes it is to deal with the additional demand for housing, it is obviously not that these new homes will be occupied directly by immigrants.

To be even more specific, the difference in projected household growth between ‘high’ net migration and ‘zero’ net migration is 95,000 households per year or more than one additional household every 6 minutes.

These patterns create consequences for almost all sections of society.

Most new immigrants move into the private rented sector which has grown as the immigrant population has grown. Competition for rented accommodation obliges all those in the private rented sector to pay high rents which take a large share of income and makes saving to buy a home even harder.

These resulting high rents and a shortage of housing make it much more difficult for young people to set up home on their own so they have to spend more time in house shares or with their parents.

The problem in the private rented sector may well be exacerbated by recent moves to clamp down on the buy to rent sector.

High rents and high house prices resulting from an imbalance of supply and demand in the market often means that families have to live in overcrowded conditions or move away from their local area to find suitable accommodation that they can afford.

Those living in the parts of the UK with lower housing costs cannot afford to move for work leaving, them trapped in areas with fewer opportunities.

Of course there are other drivers to housing demand, some of which will have been hidden by the recent undersupply in the market.

For example, if supply were to be increased some younger people would leave their parents’ home or house shares thus adding to effective demand.

But this cannot get away from the fact that a huge increase in population is driving a demand for housing that we are finding difficult to cope with, at least without potentially damaging the quality of life for those who already live in our country.

A satellite survey by a research team at the University of Leicester between 2006 and 2012, found that between 2006 and 2012, 22,000 hectares (54,000 acres) of green space in Britain was converted to “artificial surfaces” – mostly housing, but including the roads, other infrastructure required to support the houses themselves.

More than 7,000 hectares of forest was felled, 14,000 hectares of farmland concreted and 1,000 hectares of precious wetland was drained to make way for urban sprawl.

That’s a landscape twice the size of Liverpool, transformed forever, in just six years.

Without a substantial change in policy, the same thing will happen – again and again and again.

Membership of the European Union is usually measured in monetary terms but there are other ways of measuring the cost.

A constant unchecked flow of migration will inevitably result in more of our open spaces and natural greenery being turned over to housing.

Some of that may be inevitable, with growth of our own population, or changing social behaviours, but simply because some of this pattern may be inevitable is no reason to be resigned to it.

My message, especially to the young and those with young families is this – if we remain in the EU, if we have uncontrolled migration year after year after year after year, you will find it harder to get a home of your own.

You will find it harder to see a GP or you will find it harder to get a school place and you will see our green spaces disappear at an even greater rate.

If we are unable to control immigration and registered from its current levels, then we will pay a much more subtle and long-term price than money can measure.

26/12/2021