HC Deb 27 May 2004 vol 421 cc1804-12

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Charlotte Atkins.]

6.2 pm

David Wright (Telford)

I am pleased to be able to raise the important issue of housing market renewal. Before I begin, I should declare that I am a member of the Chartered Institute of Housing. As I have told the House on several occasions, I pay it money rather than receiving any financial benefit myself, but as I will be commenting on some of its work, I should place that on the record.

Before I develop the theme of the debate, I should like to mention that my good friend Councillor Jim Hicks is at this very moment being made mayor of Telford and Wrekin council. I wish him all the best for the coming year.

Councillor Hicks is interested in housing market renewal and he was pleased to know that I had secured an Adjournment debate.

Thankfully, the renewal of housing markets and the development of sustainable communities is moving up the political agenda. To put it simply, sustainable communities are the bedrock of a decent, tolerant and inclusive society and the stability of housing markets is central to that. I want to concentrate on five key themes: the complexity of housing markets; the importance of investment in neighbourhoods; the role of the housing market renewal pathfinders; the opportunities to learn from the new towns experience—that is especially important to me, given that I represent Telford; and the need for a national strategy for housing market restructuring and the subsequent creation in short order of a "midlands way."

Housing markets are complex and need a range of interventions by the public and private sectors and local residents to make them balanced and sustainable. Housing markets change because of several factors that affect the desirability of neighbourhoods. Market decline can occur in small pockets and/or in swathes of a town or city. It is not limited to large metropolitan areas; it can happen anywhere.

Areas where the housing market is generally dysfunctional exhibit several characteristics. There will be obsolete housing stock, which does not meet the needs of the local community. The design of the stock and the surrounding environment will be failing. The private rented sector will be in decline or badly managed and regulated. There will often be a mismatch between the supply and demand of house types—for example, too many high-rise flats or systems-built dwellings and not enough large family homes. Often, significant change will be taking place in the local economy. There will be poor quality mixed-tenure stock and, in many areas, a desire among residents to leave, with consequent problems of population churning and the associated impact on other services such as schools and social services.

The scale of the problem can be as small as a collection of streets or encompass whole wards or larger areas in a town or city. We need to tackle those problems by talking to people about their neighbourhood and confronting the key characteristics that I outlined.

My second point is about investing in neighbourhoods, which is crucial if we are to create communities that are economically, socially and environmentally successful. Investment in housing and the urban forum will be central to that approach. Regenerating communities and providing housing market stability is also a route through which we can engage local people and, having listened to the previous debate, hopefully reconnect them to civic life and structures. Much of the casework that comes through my surgery is linked to housing market change, whether it is people who need housing or those who are coping with the environmental problems of neighbourhoods in decline.

We need to break the cycle of decline through comprehensive market renewal linked to wider regeneration programmes and restructuring local economies. There is undoubtedly a need to develop more quality homes for rent and sale in this country. The Barker review indicates that we need to build significant numbers of new dwellings each year to tackle change in the UK housing market—120,000 private sector homes per year and 21,000 social housing units per year for several years. That is not, as some have tried to portray, an issue between north and south. Poor-housing needs to be cleared and estates redesigned across the country. Redevelopment is also needed, with high-quality new homes for rent and sale. The National Housing Federation, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Local Government Association have proposed a building programme of 140,000 extra homes by 2007–08, costing some £8.4 billion. I hope that that will be considered carefully as part of the spending review process. The proposal forms part of their submission.

Thirdly, the creation of the nine housing market renewal pathfinders was a major statement of intent by the Government that they take housing investment and policy development seriously. Tackling problems in these areas will need major, long-term engagement by the private sector, and local people will need to invest in their homes and communities. The £500 million allocated will significantly pump prime the process.

However, each area will need continuing investment in order to deliver, because they are at different stages of development and they need time to become self-sufficient. So we need to focus on those areas extremely carefully and to learn from their experience in delivering housing market renewal. We also need to integrate their approach into our wider policy understanding of housing.

My fourth point is that we have a lot to learn from the new town experience in regard to the development of sustainable communities. Telford had a massive programme of new building based on the neighbourhood unit theory formulated by US planners in the 1920s. The problem that we are confronting now is that the investment in the infrastructure of many of the areas that were built over a short period of time has not been sustained for some years. Several estates in south Telford, including Sutton Hill, Woodside, Brookside and Malinslee, were built using the 1920s model, in which the estate was surrounded by a circular road network and local facilities were provided at the centre of the estate. That design layout has come to be known as a Radburn estate.

Those estates were excellent, and they provided superb accommodation for many people, including the large numbers moving out of the black country whom Telford was designed to take as overspill population. However, there was a lack of sustained investment in those estates throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Most of those housing areas are now between 30 and 40 years old and they are all falling into decline at the same time. I shall go on to talk about some of the positive things that we are doing to arrest that decline, and I hope that lessons can be learned for other areas.

The new town experience shows us that we need to take a comprehensive approach to infrastructure provision and to sustain investment in housing stock and public amenities over time. We are now starting to get that right in Telford through a partnership between the council, English Partnerships, the Housing Corporation, the private sector and, most importantly, local communities. This involves an understanding of local estates and their market dynamic, and we need to ensure that regeneration initiatives are comprehensive and that they incorporate investment in the social and economic infrastructure of communities.

In Woodside, for example, we are changing the structure of a large Radburn estate through a unique approach which I hope can be replicated elsewhere, and investing in a major new multi-use community facility in the centre of the estate funded via a partnership with Advantage West Midlands. That community centre will, I hope, bring a range of services—including NHS dentistry, about which we have heard a lot recently—into a new centre for residents of that community. Our approach also involves reconnecting the estate to the older centre of Madeley, and regenerating that town to ensure that it can provide shopping and community facilities for the wider south Telford area.

We now need to use the experiences developed in Woodside and to transfer them to other estates in Telford, and other estates across the UK, from which we can also learn, but we need resources from the regional housing board and a recognition that pockets of deprivation that do not show up on larger deprivation indices also need investment. Telford will be central to the development of a regional housing market renewal strategy. We are delivering more than 6,000 new mixed-tenure units through the work of English Partnerships and the local authority, along with clearance and estate remodelling in older housing areas. This is allied to proposals comprehensively to remodel Telford town centre so that it can build on its reputation as a regional shopping centre. We hope to make it a focal point for cultural activity and evening entertainment with new living environments of the highest quality. It is in towns such as Telford that we will meet the housing targets for the west midlands. We are about to embark on the second phase of the comprehensive renewal and redevelopment of Telford. At 40 years old, Telford is middle aged, but I hope that it is fighting fit.

My final point is that the nine pathfinders are very important because, as I have said, they provide a route through which we can mainstream market renewal. They do not, however, constitute a comprehensive national strategy for housing market restructuring that would enable the Government to meet their own policy targets by providing a funding and policy framework in mixed-tenure areas, promoting community cohesion, sustainability and regeneration in areas of privately owned and rented homes, and ensuring that links are made with wider regeneration initiatives.

There are many areas not covered by the pathfinders, which are now being identified by the regional housing boards. The communities plan acknowledged that the nine pathfinders cover half the dwellings identified as at risk of market dysfunction and community abandonment. The remaining dwellings are not covered by any specific national strategy or funding mechanism, which clearly needs to be addressed. The problems are at their worst in the midlands and the north, but there are dysfunctional markets across the whole country. As one goes around London, one sees pockets of housing market dysfunction next to area; of very high-cost housing. It is not a north-south issue; there are dysfunctional housing markets across the board, although the pressure is most significant in the midlands and the north.

In advance of this work, a national strategy perspective has been developed by the National Housing Federation and the Chartered Institute of Housing, with support from the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, and a number of case study areas, including Telford and the black country, Tees valley, West Yorkshire and Furness and west Cumbria. The NHF and CIH envisage that a national strategy would be built on the following main principles: to create sustainable communities in areas of actual or potential market collapse; to manage planned interventions over a number of years; to lever in as much private funding as possible; to maximise housing money by matched funding from other related pots; to create and/or support effective and efficient delivery vehicles and mechanisms; to enable public sector programmes to be delivered in areas of housing market stability; and to link housing activity with complementary physical and social regeneration initiatives.

We need to produce a national strategy for housing market restructuring that is led by the regional housing boards. I am not suggesting that we need a top-down approach. We need national leadership, but we need regional housing boards to identify areas where housing markets are dysfunctional and to put forward proposals and co-ordinate activity to make significant change. They will marshal the resources from the public and private sector. Delivery on the ground needs to be via a range of partnership vehicles that fit the needs of individual areas. There will be no one-size-fits-all approach in relation to this debate; it will depend on what local people want, and what can be delivered in local areas.

The NHF, the CIH and the Local Government Association suggest a £350 million pot of public resources over the lifetime of the spending review period, as an addition to, and a ring-fenced element of, the single housing pot. That approach recognises the regional perspective in understanding complex housing markets. I welcome the proposals to merge regional planning and housing boards, which emanate from the debate around the Barker review. That is a major step forward in terms of our housing and planning policy. It always seemed nonsensical that a series of housing professionals were meeting separately from their planning colleagues, discussing an approach to regenerating communities and dealing with dysfunctional housing markets, so I welcome the Minister's recent comments in that regard. Each region needs to develop its own approach to delivering national objectives, and we may need to create building blocks across the regions. I should like to see the development of a midlands way, to mirror the excellent northern way proposals produced by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

I look forward to the Minister's response. I know that she is extremely interested in and committed to this area, and that she wants to deliver change for communities. Her own area suffers from some of the problems that I have been talking about, and we need a comprehensive national strategy to tackle market instability and the dysfunctional nature of many housing markets. There is a real prize, however, if we get it right. Not only can we regenerate communities and invest heavily in them, but we can reconnect those communities with the wider civic process and wider civic life. Nothing engages communities more than talking about their neighbourhood, the streets in which they live, and how they interact with their neighbours. This is a much wider agenda than just investing in infrastructure and fabric; it is a mechanism through which we can also make communities more sustainable, and reinvigorate the political process that takes place within communities.

6.29 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (Yvette Cooper)

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I know that he has long experience and expertise in housing, as was evident in what he said not just about low demand but about wider issues. I agree with much of what he said, particularly on the importance of sustainable communities and the need to treat housing issues as part of broader concerns for communities rather than thinking only of the physical structure of housing stock.

As my hon. Friend says, the signs of low demand can be very obvious and can cause considerable problems for communities. They include boarded-up houses and abandoned streets, and they are magnets for petty crime and vandalism. There are also less visible problems for those who cannot afford to leave such areas. Children's education suffers, for instance. School rolls fall. It can be hard to find work, there is poorer health, and local services decline.

My hon. Friend is also right in suggesting that areas of low demand have often been the subject of regeneration approaches that have not been effective for a number of reasons, even when they have been well intentioned. Those examples are worth learning from, and both the pathfinder programmes and our broader approach across the country should take account of them.

I do not think that those earlier approaches provided the right links between economic and housing issues. A regeneration programme might look at housing stock but ignore the fact that as there were no jobs in areas of low demand people would inevitably want to move away to find work, or suffer a series of social problems that would be concentrated on the area as a result of high unemployment. Alternatively, the approach would focus on economic regeneration and help people to find jobs. They would then leave, because they did not wish to live in an area where housing stock problems were not addressed. Then again, the approach might concentrate too much on social housing without taking account of the private rented sector and the private housing market; or it might fail to see housing as part of a wider market and a wider sub-regional issue. People's decisions about whether to stay in an area might depend on what alternatives there were, not in the next street but perhaps across district boundaries.

We have tried to incorporate all those aspects in our current approach to the housing market. The nine market renewal pathfinders are intended to tackle the low-demand problems of the most acutely affected areas. They bring together local authorities and stakeholders with the aim of developing long-term holistic solutions linking wider economic issues with issues of housing infrastructure. Six of the nine have been awarded grant of nearly half a billion pounds; £48 million has already been spent, and is starting to bring benefits to the communities involved.

The programmes concentrate on sustainable housing, the refurbishment of poor housing, the demolition of obsolete property and better management of estates. They take account of the nature of housing stock and housing supply and of the nature of demand—not just the level of demand, but the types of home that people want. They may want flats, or they may want family houses. The programmes also take account of the nature of the local economy and the community pressures that may exist. We are beginning to share the lessons that pathfinders have given us with areas affected by low demand and abandonment.

My hon. Friend rightly pointed out that low demand mainly affects small pockets of areas—even areas with a thriving housing market. There may be problems involving specific houses in a street or on an estate. A spiral of decline may be linked with antisocial behaviour or poor housing management in the private or the social housing sector. In larger areas, there may be wider problems caused by broader economic factors.

The pathfinders have concentrated on the widest areas of low demand and the most intense problems, but my hon. Friend is right that the lessons of the pathfinders need to be applied not simply to those areas, but to the small pockets of low demand.

I was interested in my hon. Friend's points about the new towns experience, which can be relevant in two ways: first, in terms of the lessons of the new towns and their success in building sustainable communities from a standing start in many cases; and secondly, in terms of the problems that they can face with housing stock. They may face similar problems at a similar period and that brings pressures.

We are putting a package of measures in place to equip local authorities with the powers to tackle low demand, including in smaller pockets, whether they are in a pathfinder area or not. Those include the provisions in the Housing Bill for selective landlord licensing to improve management in the private rented sector and to deal with bad landlords in that sector. The Housing Corporation is helping housing associations working in partnership with local authorities to improve and to stabilise local housing markets. The new tools approach is in place. New compulsory purchase measures in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 should assist authorities to deliver the step change that is needed in some areas,

We have published a housing market assessment manual that provides a framework for the analysis of local housing markets, and we want such tools to be used by local authorities in addressing particular low-demand problems in particular areas.

My hon. Friend talked about the progress that was being made in Telford. I welcome the work that he and local partners, including the borough council, have done to regenerate the south Telford estates, particularly in the housing strategy. and the progress that the local partnership has made in the Woodside estate. I was interested in his point about community facilities being a key part of regenerating the area. It is important that other areas should be able to learn the lessons from areas where innovative approaches are being taken, such as Telford.

The West Midlands regional housing board has provided funding for a housing market renewal study covering that area. A total of £1 million has been invested to research the areas where there is potential for housing market failure. We should also look at the issues that link different areas of low demand. We are looking more widely at the problem of low demand. We have the pathfinders and individual tools in place for smaller pockets of low demand.

I was interested in the submission from the National Housing Federation and the Chartered Institute of Housing about how it may be possible to go further and to put together a national low-demand strategy. Many aspects of their submission and many points that my hon. Friend raised reflect many aspects of Government thinking. We recognise that there are areas that are not currently included in the pathfinders where problems of low demand may emerge in future. The right response can deal with problems at an early stage, rather than leaving areas to face a spiral of decline.

Many of the points that my hon. Friend has made and that were made in the submission are already being taken up by English Partnerships, the Housing Corporation or the Government offices to support strategic approaches in different areas. While many of the principles that he raised are important in terms of the approach that needs to be taken in different areas, we need to maintain the strongly regional and sub-regional approach to these issues.

I do not think that there is a uniform national approach that can be applied to that kind of problem. It is exactly those local factors that need to be picked up if we are to address the specific problems that areas face. The issues that are faced in the east Lancashire programme, for example, will be different from those faced in Merseyside. There are different pressures in different places, caused by the nature of the housing stock and by local economic pressures.

Wider lessons need to be learned and we are looking closely at how to take the issue forward. We are considering, as part of the spending review discussions, a future programme of resources. We also need to ensure the regional elements, and to empower regional bodies to consider the issue and address it effectively. That is why I was interested in my hon. Friend's points about the Midlands Way, which he has raised before. We are interested in that sort of scheme. The more we have a strong regional identity, with each region driving forward its own proposals, working with the regional housing and planning structures as well as the regional development agency, the more chance we have of getting effective local solutions. Perhaps it is through future partnerships between the regional development agencies and the housing and planning sides that we have the greatest potential to address the issue in the right way, instead of repeating our mistake of concentrating either on the economic side or on the housing infrastructure side, and never the twain shall meet.

We already have a framework in place and we have made considerable progress, although there are further lessons to be learned. There are certainly lessons to be learned as the pathfinders begin their work, and there are lessons to be applied to other fields, too. We are now considering what the approach should be in some of the areas outside the pathfinder areas, and I am happy to discuss that further with my hon. Friend as we have further discussions in the Department and across Government. My hon. Friend has important expertise and experience on this matter, and I welcome the points that he has made this evening. It is welcome that Telford is leading the way and coming forward with different innovative ideas to address these issues. We need to ensure that we learn from that in future.

I congratulate my hon. Friend again on securing the debate.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-eight minutes to Seven o'clock.