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Social Housing Bill [HL]

My Lords, I tabled Amendments 21, 23 and 24. Amendment 21 is designed to try to understand how the Bill works. It is my understanding that there already are regulations on what is defined as rural, and that they are set out as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, referred to and use the 3,000 population as a base. As far as I am aware, when the population of a parish or village goes over that, it is not automatically removed from being rural—far from it. At the moment, it requires more regulation to be undertaken. That is why I am trying to understand why

“The power under sub-paragraph (2)(b) includes the power … to repeal”

something that is not yet law. I would like to understand how that will work in practice.

Contrary to other noble Lords, I am generally supportive of the right to buy in rural areas. I have heard the arguments multiple times about land, and I do understand that issue. But I am also conscious that the risk is that a lot of villages and small rural places start to become dormitory towns. Thinking

about local families, I strongly support seeing what we can do to acquire more land to get more homes, but the issue is often a mixture of where there are jobs and where there are affordability issues in regard to LHA and, frankly, people want to be able to have their family continue in that particular small village or small town. But of course there is no right to pass on council houses or social housing to your children. Would it not be better if we had some way of keeping that character and sense of community by allowing parents—or perhaps a family clubbing together—to buy that social house? There would then be that sense of continuity from generation to generation.

Quite often, it is these same families who volunteer for the RNLI, and I appreciate that there is a technical or operational challenge with people who perhaps are volunteer firefighters. Let us bear in mind that most of the countryside does not have a fire station unless it is manned or staffed by local volunteers, which is quite extraordinary. The constituency I used to represent, of 280 square miles, did not have a single full-time firefighter in it but relied entirely on people who lived and worked locally. It is that lack of continuity of community, and of families who have lived there some time, that I am concerned about. I am concerned that will be lost if somehow there is not this element of being able to try to pass on one property in one family from one generation to the next.

On Amendment 23, quite straightforwardly, thinking of the escalator to home ownership and shared-cost or shared-ownership accommodation, I have never understood why that just stops at 75%. You are given part of the way to home ownership, but it makes you think, “What on earth is the point?”—especially when, quite often, it is pretty difficult to pass on and sell a lot of these homes. People have gone into them thinking that they are their way to get on to the home-ownership ladder, only for the ladder literally to be cut off before they can reach the end. That is also challenging when it comes to getting things such as mortgages and selling on. So I want to understand why we cannot do something more about that.

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Finally, I am a little bit suspicious about this new part of the clause, and this is a probing amendment to test what would be deemed “practical completion”. Basically, it says that we have all these newly built affordable houses coming, so what is to stop housing providers right now stopping completing accommodation? What is

“fit for occupation as housing accommodation”?

They might just decide that they are not going to install the bathrooms or the kitchen just so that none of these houses will be eligible for right to buy in the future. I am not sure I like the sound of that, and I wanted to test with the Minister how she would be certain that this sort of behaviour would not happen.