Greater London Authority Bill

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment No. 78A and the threshold of 500 homes for the level of the Mayor’s intervention. Not for the first time, your Lordships will hear a slightly different perspective from the Cross Benches on a similar subject. I declare an interest, since I have not spoken before in this debate, as president of the Local Government Association, which means that I am greatly in favour of localism, devolution, decentralisation and deregulation and therefore in favour of individual London boroughs having as much power as it is sensible for them to exercise. I also speak as someone who has been involved with housing over very many years. I currently chair one of the large housing associations, Hanover Housing Association. From the housing perspective, there are comments that I must make about the threshold of 500 homes at which the Mayor would be able to intervene in planning cases. The case has already been well put that housing supply is crucial to the London economy, and that is true. Affordable housing within that supply is also an issue of the greatest importance. We lack homes that people on lower incomes can afford, which is bad not just for key workers but for the city as a whole. It leads to homelessness at the bottom end of the scale and it leads to severe overcrowding. The shortage of decent homes also increasingly means that social cohesion—neighbourhoods of people getting along together—is being undermined. People from black and minority ethnic communities, when they cannot get the home that they need, say that there must be discrimination against them. The indigenous local population, when they cannot find homes, say that it must be that the immigrants are getting all the homes. Neither of them is right; it is simply that there are not enough affordable homes to go round. This is setting community against community and family against family in those neighbourhoods. We must up our game and improve the quantity of affordable homes that are coming through the pipeline. One instrument that we are now able to exercise, which is relatively new in my long period of being involved with housing, is the power of planning and the requirement on those doing a development to ensure that a proportion of all the homes are affordable homes. That is a powerful instrument, and as long as London boroughs use it we can secure a greater quantity of affordable homes. That has been happening. I was not overjoyed to hear Westminster cited, although I know that it is trying harder to up the percentage of affordable homes that it produces from each scheme that comes up the pipeline. Some London boroughs are neglecting their duties in this regard, and we must have the powers and the fallback there, which only the Mayor can exercise, to bring them up to speed. The London borough that produced only 12 per cent and not the hoped-for 50 per cent of affordable homes is really letting the side down, and that power of intervention must come into play. Although we have our reservations from the local government perspective whenever powers are lost from the local borough level, London faces a crisis or emergency when it comes to housing and affordable housing in particular. It sounds as if bringing that threshold of intervention down from 500 to 150 is essential in that emergency situation. I fear that I am not able to support the amendment.