Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush (Lab)

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, for having brought before the House. Home ownership matters, and the decline in the number of people who are able to buy a home should be of concern to all of us. On that point, I suspect that there is more agreement than disagreement. I begin with a personal matter and a personal perspective. I grew up in a high-rise council flat, my grandparents lived in a council house, my uncles and aunts lived in council houses, and, in the community where I grew up, that was entirely normal. Owning your own home felt like an unattainable dream. Then, in the early 1990s, after a lifetime of hard work—and I really do mean hard work, with multiple jobs and lots of saving—my mum was able to buy our family home through the right to buy scheme. Whatever view noble Lords take of this policy, and I am sure there are differing views across the House, it was transformative for working people. The shame, of course, was that some of the receipts were not able to be reinvested into other homes. I just want to put on record that it did not turn all of us into Tory voters, as was an ambition of the programme. But it was transformative: it gave us our own front door, security and the feeling that we were finally set up for life. It also—I do not think we understood this at the time—turned out to be a defining moment for the generations that followed. It turns out that home ownership, as has already been discussed, is not simply about having a property; it is a way of passing security and opportunity from one generation to the next. It also showed that it was possible to work hard and, because of your own efforts and a helping hand from the state, change the trajectory of your life. That is why some recent research from Cambridge University was so sobering and spoke so loudly to me. It found—this is hardening and lengthening and has taken place over the last decades—that housing wealth and home ownership are increasingly linked to parental home ownership and parental education, even after taking into account an individual’s own work and achievements. However hard you work, or save, or educate yourself, the thing that is most likely to determine whether you will go on to own your own home is whether your mum or dad did. This cannot be right. This is not about the bank of mum and dad; it is evidence that the housing ladder is increasingly becoming an inherited ladder. We know the importance of firsts in working-class families: the first to travel abroad, to go to university, to own your own home. These milestones change horizons and expectations for those who follow. The danger is that, if fewer people become first-generation home owners, these advantages are increasingly concentrated within the same families over time, and that should trouble us. Home ownership should not be hereditary. As noble Lords know, on this side of this House we are not general enthusiasts for hereditary principles. I am therefore delighted that Labour, after many years of policy neglect, has decided that it needs to tackle the issue of supply and build more homes. That is why Labour’s ambitious housing programme matters so much. Delivering 1.5 million homes is significant, but it is a difficult target, which can be achieved only through a pragmatic, partnership-based approach to removing barriers. The Government have already shown a willingness to confront some of the difficult decisions and vested interests that previous Administrations have too often avoided, such as the grey-belt reforms, revised planning guidance, and measures to bring forward land around transport hubs for new developments that will help accelerate delivery. We know that progress will be hard and incremental and will probably involve setbacks, but I am proud of our ambition, purpose and desire to do this, because it is the most difficult thing. Alongside supply, however, there are other practical routes into ownership that matter too. Housing associations, at their best, are not simply landlords. Through shared ownership, which has already been mentioned, and other affordable ownership projects, they help thousands of families take their first steps onto the housing ladder. Organisations such as Clarion demonstrate the important role housing associations can play in supporting aspiration and widening access to ownership. They can be transformative, but they need a review to make sure that they are opening access in the way that was intended, and that these are schemes to be proud of, not a burden to those who take them up. Housing associations have highlighted many challenges with the schemes, including thresholds to participation that have not kept pace with the challenges of rents and wages, and are keeping out the people who they were designed to help. In addition, pressure needs to be applied and incentives developed to encourage innovation among mortgage lenders, helping them to develop new products and new ways of assessing risks that reflect the realities of how we live. I want to call out some of the great new products and some of the companies that are doing just that, such as Nationwide’s “helping hand” mortgage and Skipton Building Society’s “track record” mortgage. That means that if you have a track record of paying your rent on time, you are likely to pay your mortgage as well, and on the basis of that, it will lend you money. This is great, and is rooted in common sense. These are practical solutions that help creditworthy households overcome barriers to ownership, and they should be applauded. The Opposition have brought this debate because they believe home ownership matters, and I agree with them. We should also agree that hard work should be the gateway to improvement, and that is not always the case right now. These things need to change, but that will not happen simply because we talk about it. It means planning reform. It means supporting development in places where too often it has been resisted. It means saying yes as well as no. It means welcoming developments and the people who live in them. Although I welcome this debate, I ask the noble Lord opposite whether they will go beyond diagnosis and commentary, and help to support the remedies as well. The test is not whether we can agree that home ownership matters, but whether we will make the difficult decisions to make it happen. That is the challenge that this House faces, and I hope that we will find common cause in it.