Clause 2

Part of Housing and Regeneration Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 1:45 pm on 10 January 2008.

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Photo of Andrew Love Andrew Love Labour, Edmonton 1:45, 10 January 2008

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Gale. From experience of past Bills, I know that you will keep us on track during our sittings.

May I add to the cross-party consensus on the issue? Without adding much, I agree with almost all of what has been said so far and, without simply repeating it, I want to emphasise the importance of the provision being included in the Bill and the objectives. A primary function of the HCA is to provide affordable accommodation, and I think that it is recognised across the board that CLTs have a major part to play in providing that affordable accommodation.

As has been said, there are a number of pilots up and down the country. A lot of them are striving hard to get the idea off the ground and to show that it can work in practical terms, but they are meeting major institutional barriers of a number of sorts. Making the amendment to the Bill and including a definition of a CLT is important, and it is particularly important to state that the land is secured for the community, which is a principle within the definition.

At this point I should explain the difference between my amendment No. 32 and amendment No. 1. Simply, my amendment includes a commitment not only to low-cost home ownership, which is important, but to low-cost rented accommodation. I am simply trying to widen the narrow definition in amendment No. 1. That has got nothing to do with any worries about low-cost home ownership, which is incredibly important, but affordable rented accommodation is also important. The Minister will be only too well aware of the acute shortage of affordable rented accommodation not only in urban areas, such as my London constituency, but in many rural areas, where there is a problem for young families, who cannot afford to buy, even with the subsidised prices that may be available through community land trusts, but who can afford to rent, if more property were available. My amendment would enable that and two other things as well.

We were talking about sustainable communities. We have talked in the past about balanced communities. Providing low-cost home ownership only will not give us balanced, sustainable communities, and we need to stretch across. What is important, perhaps more so in  rural rather than urban areas, is that we try to balance the community by providing rented as well as home-ownership accommodation. Added to that, the measure would promote mixed tenure, hopefully in a positive way. Take an example from my constituency, where I was involved in a development of what was meant to be a mixed tenure scheme—part low-cost home ownership and part affordable rented accommodation. All the plans were laid out, and the development looked marvellous, and when the houses were built, it looked even better. Lo and behold, somewhere along the line, before getting around to selling the homes, a wall was erected between the ownership homes and the rented homes. We want to try and protect ourselves against that.

Amendment No. 32, with its commitment to both home-ownership and rented accommodation and to inherently mixed communities and mixed tenure estates, will go a long way to achieving the Government’s ambition. I come back again to the rationale that community land trusts will be a major contributor to the objectives of the Homes and Communities Agency, and therefore should be in the objectives of that agency. I assume that the Minister is sympathetic, but if he is not minded to accept the amendment, I hope that he will give sympathetic consideration to the cross-party concerns that have been expressed, and will try to find a way to ensure that, through this Bill, we galvanise community land trusts to achieve what we all hope and know that they can achieve in terms of delivering the objectives of the agency.