Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group, some of which I have co-signed with the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham of Droxford. I think we were probably both approached by the same organisation. There is one I have tabled which he has not co-signed, but I will not steal his thunder, apart from on the one that is in my name, Amendment 39. If necessary, I will come back to other amendments later, as I do not want to talk over what the noble Lord may have already prepared. I will start straightaway. In the previous debate, I said that rural people should have the right to buy, disagreeing with some of the proposals in the Bill and some of the arguments made by other noble Lords. Amendment 36 is basically saying that housing associations and local housing authorities should not be allowed to sell properties in rural areas. If somebody cannot buy it, why is it that a housing association should be able to sell it to the private market directly? The reason I say this is that, if we are concerned about the housing stock, and that is the reason to not allow a property to be sold to those already living in it and paying rent on it, then I do not understand why other private providers or private buyers should be able to come in, just because they have the money. Noble Lords may wonder why a housing association would want to sell in a rural area. My experience is that, as housing associations have got larger and larger, people are starting to come from further away. Principally, they have discovered a need to try to build homes quite some distance away. I referred to this at Second Reading, so I will not labour the point, but I have seen it happen in places such as Aldeburgh and Orford, in Suffolk. What has ended up happening is that homes are being built in Essex or in Cambridgeshire, not in the local area. It does not feel right to me that we can now, through this legislation, ban somebody who has been living in a home from buying it but we are not stopping the provider that owns it from selling it. That links strongly to my Amendment 48B, on the supplementary list, which says let us not have cash purchases; these properties cannot be sold for cash. My experience is that, quite often, a local housing association will try to sell off a dwelling, and there are two ways you can sell in an auction. You can sell for the unconditional auction approach, where you give up 10% of the price straightaway and then have to provide the 90% within 28 days, or you can go for the modern market auction, where you can potentially get a mortgage and you have 56 days to come up with the money. I do not know how many people would necessarily be able to come up with a spare £250,000—as happened in a recent sale—for the initial deposit or be able to come up with the rest of the money within 28 days, but that is the basis on which housing associations are selling property around the country. I do not think that is right. How is it that some wealthy person—a developer or entrepreneur—can buy such properties? The property I am thinking of could probably have had two or three houses built on it, with the size of the garden, and yet local people and the local council were not in the position to be able to buy that property. My amendment is quite blunt in seeking to prohibit cash purchases. It is done deliberately to provoke a discussion about who is buying when there is this big sell-off. I can visualise another property: a block of flats traditionally used by older people. Four years after the sale, again as a cash purchase, it is, surprisingly, still sat there; nothing has happened to the property and it is starting to look downgraded. I wonder if the real strategy is that the property becomes so bad that the purchasers end up getting permission to knock it down. The Minister will recall that, in previous legislation, I tried to encourage noble Lords to get to a situation where we could compel the council—this was for assets of community value, which is a slightly different matter—to use its powers to make sure that properties are kept in good nick. In this case, that has not necessarily been the case. I am trying to stop such behaviour and see what can be done with rural housing, if we are not going to allow people who live there to buy it. I have a series of other amendments. I have already explained that I have co-signed those which the Local Councils Network suggested. They merit debate and, although I do not agree with every single one of them, I thought it was important to discuss some of the wider points. As I said, I will leave that to the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham of Droxford. Straightforwardly, Amendment 39 would extend the notification period to eight weeks. The Local Councils Network has suggested that four weeks is simply not enough time for a council or housing association to make a financial decision to purchase a property, which typically requires a formal cabinet decision. It suggests that eight weeks is the minimum needed and that, during that period, if the council or another housing association submits an offer, on the existing use value for social housing, the selling housing association must accept it; if no offer is received, the property could proceed to open market sale, as it does now. I do not know the motive for four weeks, but the case has been reasonably well made for why, if this is intended to allow councils to step in and purchase those properties, eight weeks is more sensible, giving them more time to get their act together. On Amendment 47, I appreciate we have covered this issue in previous debates. I forgot to mention it earlier, but I had not tabled amendments to those amendments. If I think about areas with populations of about 3,000, for house occupation we are talking, on average, about 1,400 houses. What most people would consider to be rural is probably quite a bit smaller than that, so I have proposed the figure of 1,000, so that we can think that through. I am conscious that we have already had the debate on what rural is, so I do not expect the Minister to respond on Amendment 47. Amendment 46 is still there, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, will not be upset by my tabling an amendment to his amendment. Having moved Amendment 36, I may come back to some of the other amendments to which the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham of Droxford, will speak.