Title

HC Deb 29 May 1956 vol 553 cc124-32

Mr. Powell

I beg to move, in line 3, at the end to add: and for purposes connected therewith". This Amendment to the Title is consequential upon the Amendment which has been made in regard to mortgages.

Mr. Mitchison

I say only one word, that even the Title was too tight.

Amendment agreed to.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

7.57 p.m.

Mr. Mitchison

I do not propose to take the time of the House for long, but there are one or two matters to which I ought to call attention, and one in particular on which I want to ask the Parliamentary Secretary a question. We have discussed at some length today and on previous occasions the principle, if indeed it is a principle—let us call it the object—of Clause 1. That is a temporary Clause. It is to operate only for ten years from December, 1955, and it deals with compensation in respect of houses. It is intended to meet a hardship that we all recognise. It is a hardship that resembles the elephant in the respect that it is easy to recognise and difficult to define.

Clause 2 is another matter, and I still feel some uneasiness about it, because it contains permanent provisions the full wisdom of which I still feel somewhat doubtful about; but we had a full explanation of them from the hon. Gentleman in Committee. There certainly is a case for them, and conscious, as we are, of the hardship that it is desired to meet in Clause 1, we should not regard the permanent character of Clause 2 as a sufficient reason for voting against the Bill. We should have liked it to have a temporary character too. But that point has been discussed for some time.

Clause 3 contains one very important provision. It deals with the case of houses which are unfit—that is to say insanitary houses, in the wording which is used—but are well maintained. I need hardly remind the House that there are at present two provisions for making additional payment to the owners of those houses when they are dealt with by the local authority. One is a provision which is not covered by the Bill, and therefore I say no more than that I believe it to have only a limited application in practice.

The other is a general provision that provides for increased compensation by means of a multiplier, and the multiplier factor which is used to increase the compensation at present is stated in the principal Act, and this Clause gives power to the Minister to vary it. The right hon. Gentleman was asked in the Second Reading debate what action he proposed to take. At the time, perhaps for reasons of consultation—I do not know what they were exactly—he was not able to say very much, and so I am hopeful that the Parliamentary Secretary may be able to say a little more tonight and to give us some indication of what is proposed in this respect.

In principle, we fully see the point. This is really a question of increasing costs of maintenance and so on, and we appreciate that the people who have had to live in these unfit houses and have none the less succeeded in maintaining them in as good order as could be expected in the circumstances are, on the whole, a group of persons whom Parliament before now has tried to help a bit over compensation, and the help for whom should now be brought up to date by some provision of this sort. In this, as in other respects, the reference in the Bill to rateable value, the general assumption that the finances of local authorities will remain in much the same structure, has led me to wonder what we are to hear later about the finances of local authorities. That goes far beyond the subject matter of the Bill, but it just makes me wonder whether anything much will be done in this matter, or whether it will not. I say no more on that.

I have one general comment to make on the Bill. It will not take me long to make it. We have all of us said during the course of the Bill that it is extremely difficult to do justice in this sort of case; that we are driven to draw lines at some point so that we may deal with a class of persons whom we want to benefit, only to find that we are including among them groups of people we do not want to benefit; that it is a hit and miss business; that the operation of the Bill is still an uncertain matter; and that the most we can say about it is that we think that on balance it will do slightly more good than harm. I would make this general comment. The Bill, it seems to me, illustrates very well the real, essential difficulty of treating house property just as an investment.

There are on one side questions of human requirements and human feelings; and on the other questions of rent, questions of advances by way of mortgage, questions of compensation for property, which have an entirely different character. That relationship between landlord and tenant, a relationship in which all the spiritual value, the moral value, or whatever we may like to call it, the warmth of the matter, as it were, is on one side, while on the other the landlord—I am not assuming he is wicked—is bound in the nature of the case to treat his interest from a purely financial point of view, is not, I feel, one on which we can build permanently or satisfactorily. This Bill helps to bring out the real difficulty of that.

For here we are trying to meet a need, a hardship, if hon. Members prefer, which has a sort of moral foundation, which arose during the war, which has meant unhappiness for people who had to find houses in difficult circumstances. We are trying here to deal with that in terms of money, of compensation, in terms of what the local authority has to pay, in terms of what, to take the case we had just now, is the right way to deal with matters between a lender and a borrower. Our failure to do it shows that the essential relationship is wrong, and that to try to build on it involves confused legislation, and that this piece of legislation in particular suffers fundamentally from the same sort of confusion there is in questions of rent and rent control and the rest.

I say all that, not because on a Bill of these limits and in this form we can do very much about it, but to make a mental note—and I would ask other hon. Members to make it, too—that the Bill is really another instance of the rather unsatisfactory method of dealing with housing through a landlord-tenant relationship, with supervising local authorities and a supervising Ministry, to which we have been accustomed so long. I say to hon. Members opposite that after the next General Election, when we come back, we may consider more wholesale remedies are necessary than anything that appears in the Bill.

Having said that, and having delivered to somewhat empty benches and unheeding Members opposite a warning of what is coming to them, I would end by saying two things. First, on balance we regard this as a small Bill and an illogical Bill but as rather a good one, which we on this side have, of course, made a very great deal better than it was. Lastly, I say with some reluctance, but I must say so, that the Parliamentary Secretary has done his job quite remarkably well. It was a proper tangle of a Bill, but he has done very well with it. The abuse I shower on him from time to time is abuse of his views and not of his competence.

8.8 p.m.

Dr. King

I shall not detain the House more than a few minutes. This Bill is a novel departure from previous housing legislation, but a justifiable one, and as one of the hon. Members who last year put down a Motion urging the Government to introduce some such Measure I want to congratulate the Government on the Bill as far as it goes. The Parliamentary Secretary has shown his usual consummate ability in piloting the Bill through, and I congratulate him on this and on his wisdom in accepting some very useful Amendments from the Opposition. Had he accepted others which the Opposition proposed this would have been a much better Bill.

However, even when the Bill becomes law there will be a considerable amount of hardship among owner-occupiers. In a debate a little earlier today my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham (Mr. Gibson) rightly reminded the House that the Bill will benefit only one group of owner-occupiers, only the owner-occupiers who purchased property after September, 1939.

I should be out of order if I discussed the hardships of owner-occupiers before that date. I would only say that they are suffering from a bitter sense of having been unjustly treated. Just how much hardship will continue to be suffered by the group which by the Bill benefits depends, first, upon the generous interpretation of their responsibilities by local authorities. There are some legislative ways in which local authorities can help dispossessed owner-occupiers, and upon the degree of generosity with which local authorities interpret those powers will depend the amelioration of the position of owner-occupiers.

Then there is the question of the value which valuation officers will place upon these properties under the terms of the Bill, as amended on this point quite usefully by the Parliamentary Secretary this afternoon. This is quite a vague subject; nobody knows very much about it. But the amount of compensation which the valuation officer awards to the dispossessed owner-occupier will be of key importance. I do not know whether the Minister has any power to give a lead to valuation officers in this matter. The whole question still seems to be very vague. It is difficult to see what value can be put upon a house which is to be pulled down. If the Minister can give any lead, however, I ask him to do so in the spirit which has guided our deliberations through all the stages of the Bill, and to ensure that the interpretation of valuation officers will be as generous as possible when considering the substandard property of owner-occupiers.

Whether or not he can do that, I do not know, but there is one thing which he certainly can do. Under the Bill he is empowered to introduce regulations varying the amount given to an owner-occupier because he has maintained his house well. Generally speaking, under the old law he was to receive three times the rateable value. The Minister has undertaken to introduce regulations which, one gathers, will alter that multiplier from three to a greater figure. I ask the Parliamentary Secretary to convey to his right hon. Friend the necessity, when considering those regulations, to bear in mind the hardships suffered in spite of whatever compensation owner-occupiers may receive by way of the valuation of their property. The Minister can alleviate the position of all dispossessed owner-occupiers to some extent by increasing the multiplier in the case of those owner-occupiers—and I believe it is the majority—who have devoted themselves to keeping their little properties in very good condition. I urge him to do so.

8.13 p.m.

Mr. Powell

With the leave of the House, I should like briefly to reply to some of the points which have been raised. At earlier stages we have discussed the essential difference between the owner-occupier who purchased his house before the war, who has occupied it for 17 years or more, and also bought it in quite a different set of circumstances, and the owner-occupier whose position will be met by Clause 1. I will not go into that question again. The well-maintained payment, as the hon. Member for Itchen (Dr. King) recognises, will be a help to many owner-occupiers who bought their houses before 1939 and who therefore qualify under Clause 3 but not under Clause 1.

The hon. Member referred to future problems of valuation. While it would certainly be improper for the Minister to give any direction upon these matters, a very careful investigation has been made of the possibility of arriving at reasonable valuations of these properties, and I am assured that in the ordinary course of valuation there should not be any difficulty in assessing a value for these properties under the terms of the Bill as it stands amended.

I now turn to the points made by the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison), whom I thank very much for his generous reference to me. Like the hon. and learned Gentleman I shall not go at any length into the question whether the compensation for business interests should or should not have been permanent. I will only say that even after the great mass of the slum problem has been dealt with, there must be over the years a deterioration of individual properties into a state in which they become ripe for demolition orders. It would surely be wrong then that premises which are properly occupied otherwise than for habitation should be dealt with under the penal provisions which were designed to apply to the habitation of uninhabitable houses.

On Clause 3, the hon. and learned Member asked me a question of which he gave me notice during the Committee stage. Section 42 (2, b) of the principal Act which, by Clause 3 of the Bill, the Minister can amend by order in certain respects, uses the rateable value of these houses as a yardstick of the reasonable cost of keeping them in repair. That was the purpose for which our legislative ancestors used rateable value in that paragraph. They said that an owner-occupier might well have to spend, over five years, three times the net rateable value of a house in order to keep such a house as this in a well-maintained condition. They went on to say that, after making allowances for what he would get from a tenant out of the restricted rent, a landlord would probably have to spend one and a half times that rateable value out of his own pocket in order to keep the property in reasonable repair. Thus they were using rateable value in 1936 as a yardstick of building costs in 1936.

The rateable values of the houses with which we are here concerned have remained virtually unchanged in the new valuation lists, and the rents from which the landlords derive an element in respect of maintenance are also unchanged since 1936 by virtue of the Rent Restrictions Acts. But that of which rateable value was intended to provide a measure—the cost of building—has changed enormously. So it is right to compare the average of building costs over the last five years with the average of building costs which our predecessors were looking at twenty years ago. Subject. to consultations which he still has to have with the interests concerned, my right hon. Friend has in mind the figure of three times, as representing very fairly and generally the changed relationship between the yardstick and that which it is intended to measure. In other words, subject to what I have said, he has it in mind to multiply by three the multipliers of one and a half and three which appear in Section 42 (2, b) of the principal Act.

Mr. Mitchisonon

That is on the assumption that the rents remain the same, is it not? May we take it that this proportion will stay unless and until any change is made in rent control?

Mr. Powell

All sorts of things may change over the years while Clause 3 remains in force. We may nurture the hope that even building costs may change. It is for that reason that the adjustment is proposed to be made by this Clause by way of order rather than by writing a figure into the Bill and thus necessitating subsequent legislation if any of the factors were to alter.

The hon. and learned Member went into an ideological by-way which I felt was not very relevant to the Bill—the question whether house property should be treated merely as an investment. The main purpose of the Bill, however, is to remedy a hardship which falls upon owner occupiers—so there was a considerable measure of irrelevance in that discussion upon which I will not follow the hon. and learned Member. He did grudgingly say that the Bill would do slightly more good than harm. I believe that those who will be assisted in different ways by the three operative Clauses of this Bill will feel that it does a great deal more good than harm. But grudging as was that admission from the Opposition Front Bench, I must thank hon. Members opposite as well as my hon. Friends for the contributions they have made to the undoubted improvements in the Bill. However less than graciously credit was taken for some of these changes, they were all desirable, and in some cases necessary, changes; and it would be a pity if Governments did not feel themselves free to profit by whatever advice they get during every stage in the passage of a Bill. And so we leave this Measure, to do that considerably greater good than harm, which I feel will be its effect.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.