Contribution
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, on securing this debate. She set out very eloquently the benefits of home ownership, and I do not need to dwell on them again. We know what they are, and I am sure most of us agree with them: the stability it gives and the stake in society and in your local area that it provides—we all saw the socially transformative effects of the council house sales programme in the 1980s.
We can all agree on that. The problem is: how do you deliver home ownership in modern conditions? We need to achieve it. We need an effectively functioning housing market that is capable of providing housing where people want to live, at affordable prices. At the moment we simply do not have that in this country, and we have not had it for quite a long time.
Much government policy over the last 20, 40 or even 70 years—it depends where you start—has been going in the opposite direction. Obviously, this all began with the Town and Country Planning Act and the green-belt policy that first came in in the 1950s and has expanded since then. But a lot of the real damage was done in the 1990s and afterwards, with the huge rise in stamp duty that has persisted, and the constant green and environmental restrictions on what can be built, how it can be built, where you can build, the style in which you can build, and so on and so forth. To mitigate all this, successive Governments have engaged in price manipulation, such as the so-called affordable housing scheme—subsidised housing, really. Of course, we have had the latest wave of restrictions on tall buildings, specifically in London, that has brought housebuilding almost to zero. We have had the war on renters across successive Governments that has also destroyed rental stock.
This has taken us to a position in which we have a planning process where there are simply too many blockers in the process to get the job done. We have the absurd situation that the green belt now is actually bigger than the developed area of the country. It is quite an unusual belt that is bigger than the area it is trying to constrain, and it is certainly constraining the growth of our cities and towns pretty effectively. Prices are of course super high as a result of all this.
It is worth pausing for a moment to contrast the situation in this country with that of other European countries, which are of course our nearest comparators. It is true that the UK is a fairly small and dense country, and England even more so. However, there are European comparators, and the story is not particularly flattering. Belgium is a country I know well. It still has a lot of natural beauty of all kinds and is only slightly less dense in population than England is. Of course, the Netherlands is significantly more dense.
Here in England, we have 430 dwellings for every 1,000 in the population, in the Netherlands there are 490 and in Belgium there are 500. Our dwellings are also the smallest in Europe. If we want to give English people the same housing opportunities as those in Belgium and the Netherlands—and that is a reasonable aim—we will have to build 2.8 million houses just to catch up with just the Dutch, 3.6 million to catch up with the Belgians, and 4.5 million if we aim for the European average. That is simply to catch up, not to deal with any of the social changes or trends that are currently driving the problem.
We have to face up to this reality. Much of the current debate on this question—not just today but generally—is about trying to avoid this reality and the belief that we can somehow have more houses without changing any of these rules: the magical Tardis-like powers of the brownfield in cities that can supposedly accommodate everything we need. We have a policy that appears designed to maintain the economic geography of the 1950s and 1960s and never allow villages to merge or towns to grow. We have the belief that people can be made to live where the houses are, rather than the other way around, and we have an endless circular debate about social, council and affordable housing—we have one of the biggest sectors in Europe, of course—all of which is avoiding the problem.
The Government deserve a bit of credit for the planning Act and for the latest plan, but the solution is not driving the current system to work harder, and still less is it, as some have suggested, to allocate housing to favoured categories of workers. It is not about telling people they need to rightsize and that they are somehow occupying the wrong kind of house. It is about freeing up the system and trying to generate a real housing market with incentives to build, invest and grow, but we are simply not achieving that.
I fear we are heading to a social and economic crisis if we do not look this hard in the face and realise we have to do some things that many of us do not particularly like. We have to give opportunities to our young people to settle and to have houses, as we did. We need to get serious about this.