My Lords, I have two amendments in my name that I wish to speak to briefly. However, prior to that, I say that my noble friend Lord Stunell made an important point about how all the amendments here are trying to resolve the
issue of what is affordable. So-called affordable homes are those built by the commercial sector as part of a development—a planning obligation—yet the challenge for us all is to provide homes at a social rent, which is roughly estimated as 50% of the market rent.
It is a tragedy for this country that successive Governments seem to have abandoned provision of homes for social rent in any large numbers. Local authorities have been severely constrained in building their own social housing, and the provision of homes for social rent has largely been left to housing associations. We then come to the conundrum which the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, just rightly pointed to—that the capital that housing associations receive from government depends on their flow of rental income. Therefore, do you have more or less? Either way, everybody agrees that there are insufficient homes for social rent.
About 30 years ago, my authority had 42,000 council houses at social rent—it now has 21,000. That is the scale of what has happened. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Stunell is absolutely right that about half of them are now back in the market as private rented properties at a higher rent for folk but without any of the support packages provided for homes for social housing rent within either a local authority or a housing association. That is a huge challenge that this country needs to tackle. One of the key factors in levelling up is a decent home—it is in the levelling-up missions. Millions of people in our country do not live in an adequate, safe home appropriate for their family, and we need to address that scandal.
On affordability, my noble friend Lord Stunell expertly laid out the issues, and I do not wish to say anything, except that obviously I totally support him. I wish to raise one issue about affordability that is a bit of a side issue. It seems that any property built as part of a commercial development which is deemed affordable should be affordable in perpetuity. My own council adopted that policy—I have to say as a result of pressure from my own party there—so that, when the house is bought, the 80% factor remains. The least the Government could do is to include that as part of a definition of affordability.
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I just point to the two amendments in my name, the first being Amendment 286, about the future homes standard. I am an optimist. June 2023 is in the amendment to adopt it, but I doubt whether this Bill will have reached anything like the end of its route by then. The idea is that, if you can incorporate the future homes standard, which is about changing building regulations so that new homes are built to a much higher standard of insulation and improved heating and hot water systems, it would mean that developers would have to start recognising it, and not try to get away with it. Unless we adopt it now, it will be at least five or seven years before those properties are built. That was the purpose of that amendment—and to define affordability in a local context. Where I live in West Yorkshire, you can still buy a house for £150,000. You probably could not buy a garden shed for that in London. There is
a wide range of house pricing and housing rents, and local authorities ought to be able, as part of their understanding of their local area, to define that.
Lastly, I reference Amendment 262, about national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, raised them, and I agree with what she said. If we are to retain the landscape value, which is the purpose of these definitions, we must enable local people to have homes that they can afford—hence the amendment in my name. With that, I look forward to what the Minister has to say on this very important debate.