My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 70 and 94 in my name in this group. I want to add my strong support to Amendment 68, moved by my noble friend Lady Pinnock, which aims to get rid of the IL altogether. She has spoken very powerfully to that point, saying not least that it is contrary to the central purpose of the levelling up White Paper and to the whole substance of the mission statements, which are set out—or rather, the skeletons of which have been laid—at the front end of the Bill.
The complexities and the unintended consequences of the infrastructure levy were explored in depth in Committee. The Government are now reduced to saying that it will be piloted first on a “test and learn” basis, and that it may be introduced piecemeal over the next decade rather than as a big bang, which I suppose is the beginning of some sort of reality check. The Government’s own amendments, which are in this group and which we shall hear about shortly, are an attempt to water it down a bit further. As my noble friend said, the Government seem to have rather lost confidence in the infrastructure levy providing the solutions that they originally imagined.
Well, we are a little bit ahead of the Government. We have completely lost confidence in the infrastructure levy as a vehicle for positive change on the delivery of affordable homes or indeed decent infrastructure associated with new development. The infrastructure levy is beyond repair. This duck is dead. I certainly hope that, if my noble friend Lady Pinnock does not get the assurances that she is looking for and a vote is called, noble Lords will go into the Content Lobby with her.
I wait to hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, has to say about Amendment 69 and what the noble Lord, Lord Best, has to say about Amendment 71. I would say that what they are offering
is palliative care rather than resuscitation of the levy. Either or both of those amendments would be definite improvements on anything the Government have tabled, so I will wait to see what is said about that.
The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has tabled Amendment 311, which is an admirable setting out of preconditions—preconditions which are so obvious and sensible that I fear the Government will reject them out of hand. Instead of seeing this for what it is—an attempt to introduce sound legislative principles into the Government’s Bill management, which I would have thought they would welcome—I suspect they will just see it as some kind of amendment to kick the whole project into the long grass. But in default of anything else, will the Minister please give the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, some help with getting those preconditions written into this model?
I turn to my Amendment 70. This returns to the vexed issue of what is affordable when we talk about affordable homes. Affordability is used in legislation at present based on the idea that, provided that there is a discount on the going market rate, a home in the private sector is thereby affordable. It is currently a standard discount, which takes no account at all of incomes in the locality, nor does it pay any attention to price differentials between similar homes. For instance, similar homes in an outer London borough such as Sutton, where I was born, are a factor of two more expensive than those in the metropolitan borough of Stockport, where I live. So for “affordability” to mean the same in the two boroughs, incomes in Sutton would need to be double those in Stockport to match the ratio of incomes to the discounted sale prices in the two boroughs.
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In fact, average incomes are indeed higher in Sutton than in Stockport—around 33% or a third higher—but average house prices are over 100% higher. For a family in Stockport, discounted home buying is a real stretch. There are plenty of people in my locality who would say that even affordability in Stockport is not real for them. If that is true then in Sutton it is simply impossible. For government planning policies to be based on a claim that current affordability rules give equal accessibility to families in the two boroughs is verging on the fraudulent.
I have not chosen the worst mismatches that there are between one place and another. I could have chosen inner-London boroughs, which compared to almost anywhere else would be worse than my examples. Of course, the contrast between property prices in popular second-home tourist areas and local average incomes in those areas is stark as well. The Lake District and the south-west peninsula, especially Cornwall, are often quoted.
I understand that my Amendment 70 could be open to criticism. For instance, as drafted, it is limited to the calculation of affordability in relation to the IL. It does not cover homes delivered by the existing Section 106 mechanism. I would be very happy to withdraw Amendment 70 in favour of a government amendment at Third Reading which included Section 106 as well, because clearly the affordability question is one that is relevant in both funding streams.
It could be said that I have failed to specify exactly what the relationship should be between median household pay and the sale price on offer in that district. Just for once, I think that is a matter for secondary regulation rather than being in the Bill.
More serious criticism might be that such a constraint would mean that the supply of affordable homes would dry up. The supply of affordable homes has dried up. In Sutton, to buy a so-called affordable home you need a household income well above the local average. The homes may be being sold at a discount, but they are not meeting the acute housing needs of that borough. It is time to recognise the reality that, in many parts of England, the technical planning policy definition of affordable is a sad illusion. In fact, it just feeds the general perception that we in this Parliament and this Government have no idea what is happening out there to real people, desperately seeking a home.
To boast about the numbers of affordable homes built, as I am sure the Minister will be inclined to do, is to taunt those without a home. Shortage of bread led Marie Antoinette to recommend eating cake, and it did not end well. Deeming a home to be affordable does not make it affordable. Now is the time—and the levelling-up Bill is the right place to do it—to put that right, by accepting the principle set out in my amendment. I commend it to the House.
The second amendment I have in the group is a simple one, aimed at tearing away the veil of secrecy that surrounds the calculation of viability in the negotiations between developers and local planning authorities. Thousands more homes could have been built with a discount if developers had been required to tell the truth when seeking approval to recalculate the proportion of homes they pledged to build when they first sought planning approval. Of course, it would be an act of fraud to knowingly tell lies to gain commercial advantage. My amendment does not suggest for a moment that this has ever happened in any case—well, not very often anyway. If it never happens, there can be no detriment to an honest developer in having his submission and his supporting case being in the public domain. If there is, very occasionally, a temptation to exaggerate, then transparency is the best deterrent.
My amendment simply seeks to remove the veil of commercial confidentiality which is drawn, without exception, over the negotiations taking place between developers and planners, and which result in a reduction in the number of affordable homes to which they are committed. My amendment would disapply Section 43 of the Freedom of Information Act, so that commercial confidentiality cannot be used as a cloak of concealment. I very much hope that the Minister can see that this too is in exact alignment with the Government’s own objectives of securing more affordable homes, and that he will therefore willingly accept my Amendment 94, which I also commend to the House.