Lord Kerslake: My Lords, I am very conscious of the hour, so I will keep this very short. I will make three points. First, the amendment was tabled in a genuine effort to deal with what I think is one of the most substantive problems with the Bill in its current form: namely, the decoupling of the right-to-buy opportunity from the means of funding it, which remains a running sore through the Bill which has...
Lord Kerslake: My Lords, if I can just explain, this is from the National Audit Office report. Part of what the NAO has looked at is the impact of the reinvigorated right to buy. Has one for one actually happened? What the NAO report essentially says is that the equivalent number that the Minister has referred to comes from comparing three years of build, effectively, against one year of sale, because local...
Lord Kerslake: The key point I am making is contained in the following sentence, which I will read out again: “To meet the target of replacing the roughly 8,512 homes sold in 2014-15 by the end of 2017-18, however, would require quarterly housing starts”, to go from their current rate of 420 a quarter to 2,130 a quarter. In other words, we would have to speed up by five times to achieve a true...
Lord Kerslake: I am conscious of the late hour but I will make one last point. I think the NAO report is on to something and I commend it to colleagues to read. It is saying essentially that it is a question of the ability to find both the land and the finance. Under the current right-to-buy policy, local authorities get to keep only a third of the receipts for any of the additional sales made. They have to...
Lord Kerslake: I will have one last go at this. The point I was making is that it is often said that we are now achieving the delivery of the one-for-one policy. We are not. That is the definitive point I am making. Indeed, that is what the NAO says. The delivery of the one-for-one policy is very difficult to achieve in its current form. You would have to change fundamentally the way you think about the...
Lord Kerslake: The noble Lord’s interpretation is correct. Because there is a third-party asset against the expenditure, it shows as debt on the Government’s balance sheet, but it does not show as deficit spending. That was the means by which the Government were able to rapidly expand the Help to Buy initiative; it does not score as expenditure in the traditional way. If the Government were to fund this...
Lord Kerslake: My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 59ZA, which proposes a new clause after Clause 63. We now move in earnest to the issue of financing the extension of right to buy. We have had a long debate about the extension of right to buy under the voluntary scheme for housing associations and we now consider how this will be financed. In moving this amendment, I should declare again my interest...
Lord Kerslake: The point I was making was that the wider the choice of opportunities to buy you give tenants of housing associations, the more likely it is they take up the offer of a portable discount, and the cost will therefore be higher. We will return to how this is financed, but I have a real problem—as I will say later—about a policy that effectively controls the spend by having to say no to...
Lord Kerslake: My Lords, I declare my interest as president of the Local Government Association and chair of Peabody. It is important to be clear that when housing associations signed up to the voluntary agreement, as Peabody did, they did so because they believed that it was the lesser of two evils. The alternative, as my noble friend Lord Best has very clearly described, was a mandatory scheme that would...
Lord Kerslake: As has been said by a number of people, there are real issues about what we mean by a portable discount. In my eyes, if we are unable or unwilling to offer a property or take a policy decision not to do so, the alternative discount may be offered on another housing association property, potentially one of Peabody’s newbuild properties—we build some 1,000 properties a year. I have real...
Lord Kerslake: I apologise for intervening again, but there is a critical point to be made here. When you consider the viability of a regeneration scheme, you can juggle the mix between market, sale, affordable rent and shared ownership, but in the case of the proposals for starter homes, we will have a number dictated by central government that in effect will be required to be delivered. That will have an...
Lord Kerslake: My Lords, I add my support to what I think is an excellent amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. It absolutely goes to the heart of the practical challenge of estate-based regeneration. Typically, in those situations, you are dealing with stock that is either time-expired or very badly designed, and the only solution there is to redevelop and re-provide on the site. Anybody who has...
Lord Kerslake: Before the Minister sits down, I understand that Shelter will publish its data very shortly. I was keen to have the latest data for this debate. It would be helpful if the Government could also publish not just their data but the underlying assumptions behind them so that we could have a true like-for-like comparison.
Lord Kerslake: There is a critical point here, which has perhaps been missed. When a couple or an individual seek to buy, they will make choices about what they can afford and, accordingly, where they can buy. In some situations, they will choose somewhere, as was said earlier, of lower value, because that is what they can access by way of mortgage; in other places they will gofor somewhere of higher value...
Lord Kerslake: I am grateful for the opportunity to come back on this point. The noble Lord is entirely right to say that we need to do more—there is no question about that. I strongly hold the view that we need to put a lot more into the building of new housing. If there is an issue about the existing products, as there was in London with Help to Buy, we should look to revise and amend the products...
Lord Kerslake: My Lords, I support Amendment 41A, spoken to so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Best. I declare my interest as chair of Peabody, president of the Local Government Association and chair of the London Housing Commission. The focus in our debate on Tuesday was on the impact of proposals on social rented housing. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, has said, there is a price to be paid in the current...
Lord Kerslake: To add to that, it is not good enough simply to look at national averages on this issue. You absolutely need to see the figures broken down by region.
Lord Kerslake: Perhaps I may say a few more words. The way the process works for affordable housing is that there is a bidding process through housing associations, which bid in effect in 2014-15 for the funding for a programme from 2015 to 2018. That is how they bid. What we are seeing now between 2015 and 2018 is essentially the completion of a programme that was bid for and allocated largely prior to the...
Lord Kerslake: My Lords, I speak in favour of the amendments in this group—in particular Amendment 48C in my name and Amendments 48A and 48F which I have supported. This group of amendments addresses two issues which concern me most about this section of the Bill. The first is that starter homes will come ahead of and instead of affordable rented accommodation. There is no doubt about that in the way this...
Lord Kerslake: I think that many of us split up our contributions in the expectation that we would consider Amendment 48 in more depth in the next grouping.
