| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
There are contradictions in what the Opposition parties say on this issue, but the statistics and examples speak for themselves as to what priority is given to affordable housing, particularly affordable rented housing. Why do authorities such as the newly Conservative Hammersmith and Fulham council prefer intermediate housing? Because much of it in high-value areas is completely unaffordable. The Radio Five Live programme showed that in many cases incomes of £40,000 to £50,000 were needed to access shared ownership housing. Nobody would deny the need for intermediate housing to allow people to get on to the housing ladder, provided that it is genuinely affordable housing. It is difficult to build in high land
value areas. Hammersmith and Fulham has the highest unit cost of any local authority for registered social landlord rented property, but under Labour control it built to 99 per cent. of capacity, 70 per cent. of all starter homes were affordable and more than 50 per cent. of all affordable homes were RSL rented.
The new Tory council, like the Tories nationally, has announced that it intends to switch resources from rented to intermediate housing. The local press, particularly the Fulham and Hammersmith Chronicle and the Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush Gazette, has been exemplary in exposing what is happening. In the summer, the latter reported that 500 affordable rented units will be lost from the programme, and this in a borough with 1,700 people in temporary accommodation and 8,400 on the waiting list. Either directly, or through the powers that the Government intend to give to the Greater London authority in the upcoming legislation, we need to ensure that there is sufficient affordable housing and that it is directed towards need.
I want to cite the example of a large and significant housing development in my constituency—Prestolite Electric in Larden road. It is a 2.4-hectare industrial site that was given planning consent on 19 August 2005 for a mixed mainly residential development including 499 homes, 75 per cent. of which were to be affordable. Genesis Housing Group, a large registered social landlord, purchased the site in October 2005 but was dissatisfied with aspects of the design. It was told that the new Conservative administration would require a revision to the tenure balance to move it away from affordable and towards market if its new application was to be granted. Genesis reluctantly agreed. Having paid a substantial sum for the site, it was losing money in every month that the development did not progress. Its new application was for 453 homes, including 165 market homes—up to 36 per cent. from 25 per cent.—140 shared ownership homes, which was down to 31 per cent., and 148 rented homes, which constitutes 33 per cent. That is roughly a third for each category. The new scheme delivered a substantial number of shared ownership and rented homes and appeared to have almost universal support, including from local residents groups, which had been involved in the proposals for approximately two years.
The agenda for the committee at which the application was to be considered was published and the meeting was due to take place on 10 October. Even those of us who were sceptical about the scheme found the officers’ report detailed and balanced. It ran to 42 pages and, as I have come to expect from planning officers at Hammersmith and Fulham council, it was well written and a good report. As I said, it had almost universal support.
Two working days before the planning committee meeting on Friday 6 October, the Conservative leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, Councillor Stephen Greenhalgh, who is not a member of the planning committee, met Genesis officers with a senior planning officer from Hammersmith and Fulham. The purpose of the meeting is a matter for conjecture, at least at present. It was not the sort of early engagement in pre-application discussions that the Government’s planning policy statement guidelines recommend.
I do not need to speculate too much because, last night, I obtained a letter from the planning consultants for the developer to the senior planner at Hammersmith and Fulham that was sent following the meeting. I shall read part of it:
“I refer to our meeting on Friday 6 October 2006, prior to tomorrow’s Planning Applications Committee.”
The deadlines are tight. The letter continues:
“The meeting provided a useful insight into the priorities of the incumbent administration.
As you are aware, the current proposal for the Larden Road application provides for: 45 per cent.... social rented 20 per cent.... shared ownership 35 per cent.... private market”.
Those figures distort the picture because they are based on bedrooms rather than flat sizes, but let us leave that aside. The letter goes on:
“Following Friday’s meeting, it was indicated that a realignment of the proportion of social rented, shared ownership, and market housing would allow the scheme to greater accord with the administration’s views regarding affordable housing. The requested indicative proportion of bedrooms in the scheme was: 20 per cent. social rented; 80 per cent. shared ownership/market housing. In response to this, GHG has reviewed the scheme’s tenure mix. Various options have now been investigated, which provide for the changes requested.
If the PAC so wish, GHG would be satisfied to provide a revised tenure plan that would provide for the following indicative breakdown: 20 per cent.... social rented, 45 per cent.... shared ownership, 35 per cent.... private market”.
I do not have time to read the letter in full, but it is fascinating. It goes on to point out the pitfalls ahead, including possible objections by the Greater London authority, the Housing Corporation and the Government. Genesis suggests that they might all take exception to the proposals. Nevertheless, it bowed to the council’s will and the amount of social rented housing was reduced by more than half.
What was the purpose of the intervention by the leader of the Conservative council, apart from the obvious one of reducing social rented housing? The housing that went was clearly highly affordable, whereas it is dubious whether the housing that will arrive is affordable for any of my constituents who are in housing need.
Secondly, it is not the case, as alleged, that there was no provision for intermediate housing. The scheme that went to committee, properly researched and written up, was one third intermediate housing. It is therefore difficult to understand the justification for reducing social housing.
I attended the meeting. However, I first had to attend another meeting because the Conservative council was closing one of the main secondary schools in the borough, so I was a little late. I asked to speak. I thought that that was not unreasonable but permission was refused. None of the public ward councillors or opposition councillors had had notice of the revision to the scheme. One sheet of A4 was handed round, on which about two lines referred to it. The letter that I cited was not made public at that stage. A request by the opposition to re-consult on the substantial revision was refused and consent was granted for the scheme, with all Conservative councillors voting in favour and Labour councillors voting against it.
That brings us to where we are today. I was able to ask one or two questions at that planning meeting, by whispering them to one of the councillors, who then asked them on my behalf—which I am sure is the way in which most councils would wish to see their Members of Parliament treated. The answers that I got were that it was not admitted that the meeting had taken place, and that the suggestion had come from Genesis itself, which was clearly nonsense. This dishonest, obfuscatory process which has taken over in Hammersmith town hall is not satisfactory.
It is absolutely clear, and now a matter of public record, that it is the deliberate policy of Hammersmith and Fulham council to minimise the housing that is most needed in the borough. That is a matter of grave concern not only to me but to the Housing Corporation, which has withdrawn up to £30 million of social housing grant as a result of this decision. It is also of concern to the Greater London authority, which has not yet had the matter referred to it, even though it is the superior planning authority and has the power to override the decision made by the council. I hope that it will also be a matter of concern to the Secretary of State, who also has a role to play in the matter.
Those matters are clear, and can all be pursued in the public realm. What is not yet clear, however, is the process involved. That needs further investigation, which I intend to undertake. How could these last-minute, hole-in-the-corner interventions overtake a tried and tested planning process that had gone on for two years? The only reason why I do not yet know whether this is a matter for the Standards Board, the local government ombudsman or the district auditor is because I have not yet got all the facts at my disposal. However, I am writing today to the council and to Genesis to ask for the notes from the meeting and from any subsequent conversations that took place, so that we can finally get to the bottom of the matter.
We need to find out why an excellent social housing scheme in one of the most expensive areas of London—a model scheme, which had the approval, exceptionally, of everyone I spoke to, including local residents associations—was overturned by political whim at the last moment. That is not the way to act in the interests of the local community generally, and it is certainly not the way to act on planning matters. These matters need to be taken to a higher level, and I intend to do that. Meanwhile, I should be grateful for any comments that the Minister can make on the matter today.
2.52 pm
The Minister for Local Government (Mr. Phil Woolas):
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush (Mr. Slaughter) on securing this debate on the important issue of affordable housing in his borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. I hope that he accepts that the Government attach considerable importance to increasing the supply of housing, especially affordable housing. I therefore welcome the opportunity to debate this matter. The story that my hon. Friend has told to the House this afternoon raises serious concerns, which the Minister for Housing and Planning and I will need
to consider. Any implication of social engineering will, of course, be very controversial indeed.
It is now increasingly recognised that this country needs to build more homes across the board to meet the needs of our ageing, growing population. As Kate Barker made clear in her report two years ago, we have not been building enough homes for a generation. Over the last three decades of the 20th century, there was a 30 per cent. increase in the number of households, but a 50 per cent. drop in the level of house building. That is unsustainable and is now having the predicted, and predictable, consequences. Measured against the bedroom standard, about 500,000 households in Britain are now living in overcrowded conditions. Housing supply declined from a peak of 250,000 in the 1960s to about 130,000 in 2001. By 2005, this had increased to 168,000, and we have pledged to raise this to 200,000 by 2016. I will try to say something later about the action that we are taking to support this growth in numbers.
The London context is obviously what concerns my hon. Friend the most, however. London has a highly successful and productive economy, which makes a substantial contribution to the United Kingdom. However, as London’s success continues to attract people to the capital, sustained high demand for housing has driven up house prices. Over the past 20 years, London’s population has grown rapidly from 6.8 million people in 1983 to 7.3 million in 2003, and that growth is projected to continue to about 8.1 million people in 2016. Furthermore, the number of households in London has grown at an even faster rate, while the size of the average household continues to fall across the UK.
The rate of house building in London has increased in recent years, and although there has been some fluctuation recently, the rate is broadly holding up. The problem of market housing affordability in London is now acute—the average price of a home in London is £286,000. The London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham has to deal with many of those issues. There are extremes of prosperity and deprivation in the borough; 15 per cent. of households have an income of more than £60,000 per annum, but a third have incomes of less than £10,000. The borough is ranked the 65th most deprived in 354 English local authorities, and two of its wards are in the 10 per cent. most deprived wards nationally.
Some 1,667 households live in temporary accommodation, and it is estimated that 3,000 households live in overcrowded conditions, which puts Hammersmith and Fulham in the top 20 boroughs for overcrowding. There are 8,300 households on the council’s housing waiting list. The borough’s 2004 housing needs survey showed that there is a shortfall in the number of affordable homes needed to meet its target of providing more than 3,600 homes each year for the next five years.
The Government are making progress nationally with the affordable housing strategy. Since the sustainable communities plan was published, house building has increased, and in 2005 it hit its highest rate since 1990. The Government believe that the challenge of London’s housing needs can best be met by giving the Mayor a strong strategic housing role. Under our proposals, the Mayor will produce a statutory London
housing strategy and a strategic housing investment plan, and he will set the broad allocation of the affordable part of the regional housing pot. That will give the Mayor the power to meet London’s housing needs, and our measures will put his housing functions on an equal footing with his other statutory functions, thus ensuring strong links between them—especially between the housing strategy, the London plan and his transport and economic development strategies.
The housing target for London in the Mayor’s plan is a minimum of 23,000 homes a year, 50 per cent. of which should be affordable. Hammersmith and Fulham’s current London plan target is a minimum 400 homes a year, but I am concerned about whether its recent actions will allow it to meet that target. In the Mayor’s early alterations to his London plan, he proposed a minimum target of 450 homes a year in Hammersmith and Fulham from 2007-08. The proposed target reflects the likely future availability of sites in the borough until 2016-17.
We should be building more and more mixed-tenure communities that attract people and families from all walks of life. We should be able to walk down a street and not know whether a home is rented or privately owned. We are investing about £1.7 billion of taxpayers’ money in affordable housing in London through the Housing Corporation’s affordable housing programme in 2006-08. Between April 2006 and March 2008, the corporation aims to provide more than 28,000 affordable homes in London. Since 2003-04, it has allocated the majority of its funding to new, affordable housing in London on a sub-regional basis. In 2006-08, some £323 million will be invested in the west London sub-region through the Housing Corporation’s affordable housing programme. Hammersmith and Fulham will have a share in the 4,599 homes that that funding will deliver. Almost 1,000 of those will be social rented homes in Hammersmith and Fulham.
It is vital that affordable housing schemes provided by developers under planning obligations—the section 106 agreements—are affordable to the intended client group. The Government-funded new build homebuy scheme uses the shared ownership model and is designed to help into home ownership social tenants, key workers and other people on modest incomes who cannot afford to purchase a home outright. The scheme provides a means of buying a home in stages at a lower initial cost than purchasing a property outright.
Housing associations offering new build homebuy with grant funding are expected to produce shared ownership properties that are affordable for the intended client group, and to apply a financial test to ensure that the monthly rent, service charges and mortgage payments are within applicants’ means. Rents are capped at 3 per cent. of the value of the landlord’s retained equity, with a target of 2.75 per cent.
Housing associations are also required to satisfy themselves that applicants for shared ownership schemes can sustain the long-term commitment of owner occupation—that is, mortgage or rent payments as well as future maintenance. Where no grant is provided, it is for the local authority to ensure that those matters are dealt with—for example, through the section 106 agreements.
We have set the challenging aim to halve the number of households living in temporary accommodation by 2010. Hammersmith and Fulham has committed to ensuring success in meeting the 2010 target in the borough. It has been making progress, having reduced the number of people in temporary accommodation from 1,825 in March 2005 to 1,667 in March 2006. We have provided it with a £1.45 million homelessness grant for 2006-07.
Earlier in the year, the Minister for Housing and Planning announced a new programme of work to address the problem of overcrowding and the impact on children. We are working jointly with the Mayor and London councils to make a difference. We have consulted on raising the statutory overcrowding
standards, which were set in 1935, and we are increasing the proportion of new social housing with three or more bedrooms built in London with subsidy from the affordable housing programme from 27 to 34 per cent. in 2006-08.
My hon. Friend raised some important and serious points. I hope that I have convinced him that the provision of housing, including affordable housing for his constituency, is a key priority for the Government, which is why we take his remarks so seriously. We are committed to working with all stakeholders on that agenda in the coming months.
The motion having been made after half-past Two o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, Madam Deputy Speaker adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
Adjourned at three minutes past three o'clock.
| Index | Home Page |