Right to Buy

HC Deb 23 May 1990 vol 173 cc278-9

12. Mr. Gerald Bowden

To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment what discussions his Department has had with Southwark council about the level of capital repair charges which it sets for tenants who have exercised their right to buy.

Mr. Chope

The Department has recently written to the London borough of Southwark following representations by my hon. Friend and others about pre-sale estimates of service charges for repairs and improvements.

Mr. Bowden

My hon. Friend will be aware that those of us who take a close interest in the affairs of Southwark are convinced that Southwark council is using or misusing procedures under the right to buy to discourage people who are considering purchasing and, indeed, to demoralise those who have already purchased. Are the Government prepared to sit by and see their laws challenged in that way? More importantly, are the Government prepared to see the rightful aspirations of those who wish to purchase thwarted by those procedures?

Mr. Chope

No. Parliament has given tenants the right to buy their flats and the Government are determined to see that those tenants have the right to exercise that right. My hon. Friend is right in suspecting that the failure in performance of Southwark council is largely due to a lack of will. Southwark has sold only about 690 flats in a period when Wandsworth sold more than 10,000.

Mr. Simon Hughes

Is the Minister aware that, not only in Southwark but elsewhere, councils which did no repair work on property before it was sold then estimate the repairs required in the next five years, apparently plucking figures out of the air and charging enormous sums of money—sometimes thousands of pounds—per purchaser per year? What do the Government intend to do to clarify the law? More importantly, does the individual purchaser have a right of access to the information on which the council carried out the valuation? If not, the tenant has no possibility of challenging the figure and apparently no option other than to pay. Freedom of information as well as clarification of the law is needed.

Mr. Chope

This is, indeed, a complicated area of the law. It appears that Southwark council is trying to use that to its advantage. I have written to my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich (Mr. Bowden). Certainly it seems to the Government that Southwark has wrongly interpreted the law in certain respects. I should be happy to explain to the hon. Gentleman the Government's concerns about that. The hon. Gentleman referred to the amount of resources that Southwark has and the amount that it spends. Southwark has masses of resources. It receives £33 million in its housing investment programme allocation and this year it is likely to receive about £94 million in housing revenue account subsidy.