My Lords, as another of those involved in getting this policy in the first place, I remember the battle to try to get townspeople to understand the particularity of the problem in the countryside. Just in case—although I look at your Lordships and realise that all will have understood it—I want to repeat the fact that many of our villages, and some would say most of them, are in danger of becoming middle-class, middle-aged and middle-income groups, with hardly an opportunity for anyone else at all. This is a serious social problem. It also creates a community unable to sustain itself. Communities are about all sorts of different people doing different kinds of things and contributing in different ways.
In my former, very rural, constituency, one of the biggest difficulties is that, because there is a large number of older people and a need for a large number of carers, the social mix having been altered because people buy up houses in the countryside, it is more difficult to get carers in those circumstances than it often is in the towns. This never used to be true, but it is true now and it is to do with the social mix that has now been reduced for so much of rural England.
There is a bigger issue here, which hangs round this individual concern for the protection of exception sites. When we had the argument originally—this really is history—we managed to convince people that, because of the planning system itself, we had created a particular kind of shortage in the countryside. Every little house that used to be the house of a farmworker is, once it comes to market, an ideal, bijou residence for the part-time—very often for someone who will retire there. I am not suggesting that second homes are necessarily a bad thing, merely that such houses are so attractive that the price means that they are well out of reach of people living on agricultural wages or the lower wages in the countryside. I do not think that this is something that is bad just for that section of the community—it is bad for the whole community. It creates an artificial community of the kind that many of us deplore in the towns, and it is becoming
more and more true of large areas of the countryside. I therefore think that this is a social problem for all of us.
The one way that we managed to get people to be able to gift and to sell at an agricultural land price, or something of that kind, was, as my noble friend Lord Young and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said, because they were convinced that we meant it when we said that it was in perpetuity, for local people, and that it would not be changed. It was not only a concept but something that we felt we had committed ourselves to. I am concerned, as are others, that once you undermine people’s trust—and I think that the present circumstances without the amendments does undermine that trust—there will be no more land provided in that way. I put it to my noble friend that, if the land does not come forward because we were hoping to have some extra starter homes, what we will have done is to reduce the number of homes all over, not just starter homes but other opportunities.
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So trust is a crucial part of this in order to achieve the end, which the Government have done. In discussing this, it is probably true that all sides of the House understand precisely what the Government are about, and we do not have the kind of clash of disagreement that we have had up to now. If it were possible to have starter homes in this mix in a way which did not reduce the other homes and which provided an opportunity in certain areas, I suspect that the House would be very supportive of it. That is why I think both amendments are really very helpful.
One of them enables us to have starter homes, but in the areas where local people recognise that as a need. In the original agreement, that was precisely why we had the survey to which my noble friend referred. We wanted local people to see that there was a local need and then get other local people, particularly the parish council, to accept that need and to support the building, which otherwise they might have opposed. So it is in that spirit that we say that there should be a local lock on this. That is a reasonable sort of localism, which the Government might well feel they could back.
The last thing I will say is that however we do this, the only thing that really matters is to ensure that land goes on coming forward. Therefore, an absolute determination to show people that we are not weakening the “in perpetuity” element is necessary. It is so necessary that almost anything else does not matter, because that is the reason that decent people who care about their community give their land, which is very often a real cost to them. They are genuinely giving up some real value, but they do it for the sake of the community. We owe it to them to ensure that, having given their land for the sake of the community, they do not feel that we have undone the promise that we made both directly and implicitly.