Baroness Goldie (Con)

My Lords, I have tabled these stand-part notices for Clause 3 and Schedule 1 to probe why the Government have decided to pursue the creation of a new public body to deliver and manage service family accommodation. I indicated to the Chamber that I would pursue this under this group. These provisions would establish the defence housing service as a new free-standing non-departmental public body, taking over responsibility for the provision, maintenance and modernisation of service family accommodation. Nobody on my Benches disputes the scale of the problem that confronts the Ministry of Defence; what I do intend to question is whether the Government are pursuing the best solution. The defence housing strategy, published last year, offers a familiar formula: it talks of a clearer statutory footing, better focus and an accounting officer with defined responsibility for the housing estate. None of this tells us why the defence housing service, as an arm’s-length body, will succeed where the Defence Infrastructure Organisation has so conspicuously failed. The DIO, too, was created as a discrete organisation with a clear remit, and it has become a byword for bureaucratic unresponsiveness, even, sadly, being nicknamed—not affectionately, I may add—“DI-no”. The lesson of the failures of the DIO—and, as we must not forget, Annington Homes—is that defence housing needs a different operating model altogether, one genuinely run by people whose entire professional life is housing, and one that is accountable to the families it serves, rather than upward to the department in Whitehall. That is precisely why my party’s alternative is a forces housing association. That would be an organisation modelled on an ordinary housing association, not run for profit, with every pound of revenue reinvested in the housing stock. Its executive leadership would be drawn from the social housing sector rather than the Civil Service, and representatives of each of the three forces families federations would be given a formal seat on its board. That model would give service families something the Bill does not: an institution whose culture, incentives and governance are drawn from the industry that already knows how to run good-quality rental housing well, rather than a new public body. By contrast, a national NDPB brings with it precisely the accountability weaknesses we are all too aware of. I really would appreciate if the Minister could give the House a straight answer to a very simple question: what specific mechanism in the Bill will make service families’ complaints be taken seriously and improve the satisfaction with, and quality of, service family accommodation? My second point concerns money. I put this to the Committee because a new structure is worthless without the funding to back it up. In their defence housing strategy, the Government promised a 10-year £9 billion programme to upgrade around 43,000 defence homes—roughly nine in 10 of the whole family estate. That was, and remains, a welcome goal. Ministers understandably wanted credit for it; indeed, the Minister for the Armed Forces in the other place repeated these figures with confidence when the Bill was scrutinised in Committee in the other place in the spring. But when the defence investment plan was finally published this summer—nine months late, let us not forget—we learned that refurbishment work on some of the worst properties, the very homes surveyed and found to require substantial work or complete rebuilding, has been pushed back to fund other priorities within that plan. Antony Cotton, the campaigner who had fronted the Government’s own publicity for this programme, said plainly that families would feel let down. He had told them, in his words, that their homes were “on the horizon”. Now, sadly, that horizon has swiftly receded. My right honourable friend Mark Francois pressed the Minister for the Armed Forces repeatedly in Committee in the other place on exactly this point: the gap between the confident figure given by the Ministers in the spring and the reality that emerged a few months later once the defence investment plan was published. We have seen this pattern all too often with this Government, not least on the path to 3%. They make an announcement with headline-grabbing numbers and reassure us that everything is in hand, but, with depressing predictability, they end up pushing everything back because they cannot get a grip on the welfare budget. In a Written Answer to a Question by the noble Lord, Lord Docherty of Milngavie, the Minister stated that: “The Ministry of Defence will publish its delivery timeline for the £9.2 billion Defence Housing Strategy over the next 12 months”. Respectfully, this is simply more delay with the money. The housing strategy was published in November last year. Why have the Government not established a delivery timeline already, and why will it take yet another 12 months just to publish the delivery timeline, yet alone begin with the investment? That matters directly, because we are being asked to approve the creation of an entirely new statutory body to deliver a programme whose funding has already been rewritten within months of being announced, before the body designed to deliver it has even been established. If the Government cannot hold to their own funding timetable under the current arrangements, no amount of institutional reorganisation will fix that. Without funds that the Government promised, this is a chimera—a verbal soufflé. I ask the Minister this again, directly: can the Government confirm today, on the record, that the £9 billion and the 43,000 homes remain their firm commitment on the original 10-year timetable? Can the Minister explain why service families should have confidence that the new body created for the Bill will succeed in fixing the standard of their housing? I do not oppose the reform of defence housing delivery; I oppose the assumption that the creation of yet another arm’s-length body will solve anything. I did warn of my scepticism on this proposal, but I feel a lot better having shared it with the Committee.