That this House has considered house building targets.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am grateful to have been granted this important debate. I do not think anyone in the Chamber will disagree that we need more houses; I suspect that there will be violent agreement that we need homes and communities, not just blocks, because that will have an impact on how society develops, and we are aware of the close link between the provision of homes and the mental health of those who live in them. Given that, there is clearly a role for targets to ensure that we build more such homes, but they need to be the right targets followed by the right incentives and disincentives to ensure that we get the right behaviour.
The main house building target with which we are all familiar is the numbers target set by central Government. The National Audit Office has looked at that number and it is not entirely clear that it is valid. I am sure that the Minister will respond with exactly why that figure has been picked and whether he agrees with the NAO’s conclusions.
There is a similar challenge with the local government number, which is generally based on each 10-year census, the last of which was in 2014. There is room for some flexibility around affordability, but that is about it. In the same way, then, those local government targets also need to be properly validated, and we need evidence, so it would be appropriate for local authorities to be required to collect more information about that housing need and to look at brownfield sites and empty properties that are not being used.
Local authorities also need to be given more flexibility and enforcement power to bring uninhabitable sites into habitable use. Although, clearly, there are powers, the challenge is that most local authorities choose not to use them, because they do not have the finances or resources for a long, drawn-out process. That is not the right approach, however, and we need to consider how to make it simpler and easier for local authorities to use their powers. The real need has to be established, not just estimated.
If we are to look at the totality of the housing we need, we must also consider the challenge of land banking. Local authorities need new powers to prevent that behaviour. We could do that in a number of ways, such as by looking at the rules that allow a developer to comply with the legislation enforced at the time he purchased, not the time he develops, when it is often more stringent. One small thing would be to say, “You must comply with the rules as they are today.” We could also consider some form of compulsory notice, or, in extremis, compulsory purchase, to make sure that those plots of land are brought into supply.
The targets based largely on numbers are not enough. There are probably four areas that we need to look at, for which there are some targets and plans that are, however, not strong enough. Those four areas are affordability, environmental impact, infrastructure and community benefit. On affordability, I do not think that any hon. Member present disagrees that 80% of the market frankly does not represent anything affordable. The problem is that the link is with the market price of the house, not the average salary. I appreciate that if we make that link, there will be a huge funding gap that will have to be met from somewhere; I will come on to how I might do that in a minute.
We need new national and local targets for affordability, and we need to ensure that they cannot be diluted. Many developers, having said that they will develop x% in accordance with the local council’s rules and regulations, come back and say, “Oh dear, I cannot develop that number of affordable homes. They must all be executive homes”, and because the council is so needy of the community infrastructure levy and the new homes bonus, by and large, it caves in. That cannot be right.
The hon. Lady is making a very interesting speech. On the point about whether a developer can develop the proportion of social housing units, does she agree that developers should be required to publicly produce their affordability assessments in order that we can all have a look at those figures?
That sounds to me like an excellent proposition—I agree.
With absolutely the best interests at heart, the Government have introduced very good schemes, such as Help to Buy and so on, and I believe there are more on the way, but the challenge we have is that if a local authority complies and creates enough housing stock as part of those schemes, that squeezes the amount that can be available for truly affordable housing. Where I am in Devon, that has been a huge challenge for Teignbridge District Council. Once the percentages of affordable homes are agreed, they should be pretty much immovable, except in extremis. It should not be in the gift of the developer to change that.
How are we going to pay for all of this? I think we all accept that the fundamental link between salaries and the cost of a property has been broken and needs to be fixed. We need to look at how to share more fairly the benefit and the burden of the windfall that comes, first, as a chunk taken by the owner and, secondly, as a chunk taken by the developer. How might we do that?
Owners already pay a tax, so they do have to make some contribution. In addition, they should be required to set aside a fund for infrastructure provision, which is one of the biggest challenges for any housing development. That would be important. That money should be provided up front.
At the moment, the owner getting paid generally depends on the developer getting planning permission. It should be conditional not just on that but on the delivery of the infrastructure and, potentially, the affordable housing. There has to be some way of tying the owner to a greater responsibility for delivering the homes.
What can we do with regard to the developer? The developer is generally already required to make a contribution to the infrastructure, but, by and large, it is not an up-front contribution. We need to make changes so that it is. We need to look at putting infrastructure in place before we build even one house. There will be some occasions when, for practical reasons, the houses have to be built before the roads are, but the principle is important.
Order. The debate can last until 5.30 pm. I am obliged to call the Front Benchers no later than 5.7 pm. The guideline limits are five minutes for the SNP, five minutes for Her Majesty’s Opposition and 10 minutes for the Minister, and then Anne Marie Morris gets two or three minutes at the end to sum up the debate. Four Back Benchers are seeking to contribute, so I am afraid that there will have to be a time limit of four and a half minutes, to make sure that everybody gets in.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I want to focus my remarks on land banking. Hull is a growing, successful city that is attracting significant investment and undergoing positive change. The council has already granted numerous housing, commercial, industrial and educational permissions, the majority of which have been implemented.
In my hon. Friend’s constituency, Goodwin Community Housing is a great example of brownfield sites being used to build modern, modular, low-carbon housing. Does she agree that we need to see that model of housing develop if we are to meet our housing targets using brownfield sites?
I completely agree, and I look forward to going to see those properties on Friday.
We have a problem with landlords not implementing their permissions in full, and with one landowner in particular. The problem is not just that sites are not being developed, but that landlords are failing to manage their responsibilities for them. There are patches of land across the city—I will talk about the details in a moment—that are being left to go to ruin, and landlords are not taking full responsibly for health and safety.
The Lord Line building is a site of personal significance to the people of Hull, as it is one of the last buildings relating to Hull’s fishing heritage. It is the site of the dock where the fishing boats used to come in and out of when we were the capital city of the UK for the fishing trade, but it has been left to go to ruin. Youths go in there for reasons that I do not want to elaborate on here. We can see from the discarded needles, the bricks thrown from the top of the building, and the fire engines that attend the site regularly that it is not being properly safeguarded or protected. There will end up being a tragedy there, because people keep going to that building and it is not being looked after.
The owner of that land also owned the former Rank Hovis Clarence Mill on St Peter Street. They pledged to clear the building and promised a Radisson Blu hotel in its place. The demolition and clearing work still had not started by 2015, and in 2017 the permission expired and was not renewed. They bought the Heaven & Hell nightclub in March 2011. They said that they were going to put a £15 million development called Manor Cube on the site, and stated that the building work on the hotel would be completed by July 2013, but by that time no work had been completed.
The Lord Line building has been left to go to rack and ruin, causing great upset in the fishing community in Hull. The company—Manor Properties—seems to have a habit of promising pie-in-the-sky, wonderful, big dreams to the people of Hull, while letting the areas go to ruin.
When I first came to the House in 2008, I began work on a paper called “Open Source Planning”, which set out an important distinction and led to the abolition of the top-down targets that had existed under the Labour Government. It took a little while to get rid of them, but we have not replaced them. The Chancellor’s target of 300,000 houses is an aspirational or soft target, because it cannot be achieved on its own without consequential changes to the planning system. We have already made a large number of changes, and there are more on the way.
The main target that we should be aiming for is one based on housing need. Under previous Administrations, it was left to individual councils to come up with the figure for housing need and methodology to calculate it. That was incredibly expensive for councils and led to an enormous number of court cases, as developers challenged them. I was very pleased when the Government asked me to sit on the Local Plans Expert Group and come up with a new methodology. We were the first to introduce a methodology based on Office for National Statistics figures. Although there are some problems with it, which I am sure the Minister is aware of, it is a very useful starting point.
Unfortunately, many other deals—for example, growth deals—have subsequently come into play and overridden those figures. The councils concerned have come up with other figures to replace the need figure that is based on, for example, strategic housing market assessment surveys that are quite old. We and councils must have an overriding desire to go back and take those figures out to the public to discuss what is being done and ensure that there is public buy-in.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) mentioned the NPPF. I am very pleased to have been involved in the original version of it. All we tried to do with it was to boil it down from thousands of pages to 50 to make it accessible to everyone.
Thank you, Mr Hollobone; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship. I congratulate the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) on securing this particularly important debate.
Since 2010, housebuilding has fallen to its lowest level since the 1920s. Rough sleeping has risen every year, rents have shot up faster than incomes, there are almost 200,000 fewer homeowners and new affordable housebuilding is at a 24-year low. Meanwhile, average house prices are at a record high of almost eight times the average income, yet we wonder why home ownership is at its lowest level in Britain since 1985.
In reality, although 1.2 million people are on housing waiting lists across our country, this Government delivered just 6,464 social homes in 2017-18. That is simply diabolical when compared with the 150,000 social homes delivered every year in the mid-1960s. The evidence is clear: it has been done before and can be done again.
The housing crisis is about the reality behind those statistics. I am tired of the endless reports, countless debates, fruitless words and lack of action. The Government have a house building target of 300,000 new homes per year, but they simply cannot keep willing the completion of more homes without finding the means to provide them. Here are some of those means.
Hugh Gaffney (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)
North Lanarkshire Council is the biggest homeowner in Scotland. Some £160 million has been invested in 1,000 houses, on top of 800 new houses. North Lanarkshire is leading the way in Scotland. More of that can be done by the Scottish and UK Governments.
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We then need to ensure that the developer is held to account on developing the types of homes that the council needs. Whether an area needs flats or two-bedroom homes or three-bedroom homes, or whatever, will be in the council’s local plan, with more information in the neighbourhood plan. Often, the developer brings an argument that they cannot provide what is required—that they need to provide executive homes, because that is all they can afford to produce. That is not the right answer. The council ought to have the power to ensure that, when it grants planning permission, it is to provide the houses or flats that we actually need. There might be a question about whether a developer would then continue to develop. If that were a national policy, rule or regulation, they would continue to develop, on the assumption that they want to stay in business.
What about the council? In this whole process, they do not have the relevant power or resource. By and large, they cannot say to a developer, “No, you are not providing the sort of houses we need.” They need the CIL money, they need the new homes bonus and they know that if they lose an appeal brought by a developer, they will have to pay the costs. That rule needs to be changed. Councils need to be free not to give planning permission where they feel it appropriate, without having over their heads the real burden of paying fees if they are then proved wrong.
On brownfield sites and empty properties, councils need to be given the power to enforce. That means ensuring that they are properly funded to do so and that the legislation has the teeth to make that happen. Without that, those who own brownfield sites or have vacant properties will not be willing to do much about them.
I want to touch on the environmental impact. This is a huge issue; it has had a significant impact in my constituency. There is a much fought-over development in Newton Abbot, called NA3. It is currently being reviewed by the Government, because the local authority did not make a decision in sufficient time. The developer has effectively said that they want it to be looked at in more detail, and that process is ongoing as we speak. I will not refer to the details exactly, as the matter is currently in train, but the way the system works means that no account has been taken of the real number of houses we need, nor of the real value of that particular piece of land, which offers much in environmental support and opportunity for the area as a whole.
Another example is Kingsteignton, one of the smallest towns in the country. It started out as a very small village and just got developed and developed. The character of that village has largely been destroyed and it has become a small commuter town—a dormitory suburb of Exeter. It was never developed to be a town, so there is no physical centre such as a cluster of shops that people can go to, to give a heart to that community.
There are a number of things that might be done to address these issues. I start with carbon impact, which is slightly dislocated from my previous point. There used to be carbon impact targets. As I understand it—the Minister may correct me—they were abolished in 2014 or 2015. It seems to me that everyone feels very strongly, and rightly so, that if we are to do our bit, we need to ensure that new housing is developed with the lowest carbon impact possible. That is not the case at the moment. Many constituents say to me, “Why are solar panels not mandated nowadays on new developments?” Not to mandate them on industrial developments certainly seems to me to be madness. That needs to be re-examined, and I hope that with the new focus on environmental matters, the Government will do that.
If the Government are really serious about trying to ensure that there are beneficial rather than adverse environmental impacts, they need to look at investing in and supporting investment in new technology to enable us to build new, high-quality, environmentally friendly houses and homes.
My other concern is about the green lungs. In communities that have been further built out, we have tried to retain small areas of parkland and so on, so that people feel the area is a home, and they have somewhere they can take their children and their dogs and so on. In a large conurbation like London, that is difficult, and we are where we are, but there needs to be a greater focus in planning on retaining the green lungs going forwards. I am concerned that we now seem to be continually reducing the footprint that a property has, and reducing the amount of land/garden. Mental health is also a big issue today, and greenness and space are very important to mental health. The link between planning, housing and mental health does not need me to prove it. It is already there for all to see.
The Government should be looking at a new strategy. Alongside looking to develop new towns—I know there are some already—they should be looking at new villages. I appreciate the appeal of new towns with their greater population, but our villages are one of the beautiful things about our green England, and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Why is it that we cannot have a new villages strategy? They might be the template for environmental pilots. If the Minister in any way accepts any of that, the national policy planning framework will need to be reviewed and fundamentally overhauled.
Let me now look at the issue of infrastructure. I have talked a bit about the funding and when the money comes forward, but I am still amazed that, although there is an obligation to put in a telephone line and connect to water and electricity, there is no obligation—unless the Minister says it has changed—to put in broadband. It seems to me that planning should not be given unless the developer makes a commitment to put in broadband, by which I mean a broadband connection to BT—not because I love BT, but because it provides the physical infrastructure. In some areas where in theory there has been a commitment to provide broadband, it has been access to Virgin or one of the other suppliers. As they do not have control over the physical network and infrastructure, the reality is that the community cannot get broadband. I am hopeful that the Minister is looking at some of the challenges.
Infrastructure is not just about electricity or broadband but about having enough schools and health provision. One of the things that has continued to surprise me is that some very important consultees are not statutory consultees. One of those is health. Although the Minister’s predecessor would say to me, “But they can be consulted, and usually they are,” my response has always been, “Well, that’s true, Minister, but the reality is that if there is no statutory obligation to do it thoroughly and properly, you will probably not do it to the degree that it needs to be done.” I am certainly aware that there are many areas in my part of Devon where we do not have adequate provision for health services, which is a real issue.
Part of the infrastructure is normally funded through the council. One of the things that has been a barrier to councils is their inability to borrow against future receipts of CIL moneys or the new homes bonus. If we could change that—at one point, one of the Minister’s predecessors started looking at it—it would make a significant difference. Although the CIL and NHB moneys go to the council, there is no obligation for them to use that money in the local area where the development takes place. I appreciate that where there is a neighbourhood plan—I am certainly a great fan of them—it is a win-win for that neighbourhood, because they get an element of the money to use in their own area. Although that is a good start, I do not believe that it is adequate.
Let me now turn to the final area where I think we should have different thinking, new targets and a new approach: the community. How does the community benefit from all this? Looking back in history, the concept of planning and planning approval was introduced because it was believed that landowners had too much power to build anywhere—rightly so, because they own the land—and it was therefore thought more appropriate for there to be some control, hence the planning process.
It seems that there is a stakeholder missing from this agenda: the community. I have talked about providing homes and ensuring that we have stable and mentally healthy communities, but we will not do that unless the community is involved. I know that there is a requirement in the NPPF to look at environmental and community issues, but there are no real teeth to it. It seems that the concept of community interest is very limited and needs to be reviewed. At the moment, we generally look at the impact of any plan put forward on productivity—rightly so—but we do not look at the impact of that development on the community’s quality of life, which is important. If we are so focused on the need for healthy communities and on reducing our mental health issues, that is critical. If we are to achieve this, the NPPF will need to be changed.
In trying to put the community at the heart of all this, we need to look at a viable villages initiative. I have referred to the issue before. One of the challenges is that most of the large developers will not develop small villages. The small developers find it more expensive because they do not have economies of scale, and many have gone out of business. Without support from the Government, we will not change that. Unless we look specifically at how we will ensure that existing villages remain viable, so that there are still enough children to attend the schools and enough people to go and drink in the pubs, we will find that our villages die. Wherever they are in the country, that will be a loss. We need to look at how we do that, be it through simplifying the planning permission or through Government grants and support for small builders. I am sure that the Minister is better placed than I am to address that.
I have an old chestnut: engagement with the community. I have raised this with just about every Minister who preceded the current Minister, whom I shall also ask to consider it. For all the reasons I have expressed, I believe that the community should have a right of appeal in the planning process. The Minister’s predecessors have always said to me, “You can’t, because you’ll create a nimby world where anybody who doesn’t like something simply puts up their hand.” I would say no. Indeed, a piece by the National Federation of Builders that was based on an article I wrote said, “You can’t do this.” I am sure its concern was that, should we get the community involved in nimbyism, it would simply block development.
If we were to manage the process properly and say that only a town or parish council could appeal, and if appeals had to be made on planning grounds, it would minimise the room for manoeuvre and for nimbyism to creep in. I recommend to the Minister that he look at this again. The intention is not to take power away from district councils; it is to get a better, joined-up system that works for communities, councils, central Government and all of us who want more houses in the right places. We want communities, not just blocks of flats.
I thank the Minister for his patience. Owing to the actions of a number of Governments over the years, our planning system is now broken. Although I commend the Minister’s predecessors for working hard to change that—much of what went into the NPPF and the new plans was good—it remains broken. It cannot just be a numbers game, which is what we focus on now. The system must take into account some of the other issues that have been raised. We have to look at how we will link house prices to wages, and I have made some proposals on how we do that. We absolutely need to address this key issue, so that people on average wages in Devon can actually afford to buy a house in a sensible timeframe, rather than having to rely on the bank of mum and dad and/or wait until they are 40. As Maslow said in his hierarchy of needs, a home is the most important thing for human survival.
It seems to me that the community must and should have a voice. I hope that the Minister will take my suggestions, and that he will look at them and digest them. I very much hope that he will stand up and say that many of these are good ideas. Indeed, it would be even better if the Minister were able to tell me that the present Government were already looking at them. I shall now sit down and look forward to hearing the Minister’s and other contributors’ thoughts on this very thorny issue.
There are a few points where I feel the Minister can tighten up the existing legislation to prevent this from happening again. We could have enhanced compulsory purchase orders where a site is allocated and consent is not implemented in full. Those powers could enable the local authority to acquire the site at 50% of its market value, provided that it commences development within 12 months of acquisition and at least 50% of the development is completed within three years. I know that the council would develop that land, but it does not have the power to purchase it. If a section 15 notice has to be served due to a lack of maintenance and dereliction on a site, allowing it to be acquired at 40% of its market value could also help the development.
The Minister should also focus public sector funding on unlocking those sites by providing additional grants and loans. The rules are set up to prevent the council from being able to compulsorily purchase the sites, but when people come into my city on the A63, they see this abandoned building on the way in. That is not the advertisement that I want for my city. People walking around the centre see patches of land that have been left or underdeveloped. The Minister could change that by just tightening up a few bits of legislation.
Removing VAT for any conversion works undertaken to properties’ heritage action zones would also help us. The Minister should change the rules about what constitutes a material start, to prevent landowners from undertaking minor works.
The best targets are those in neighbourhood plans. They have been developed by the community, and the figures from the district council that they have been built on are merely the minimum figures. The community can add to them whenever it wishes. Neighbourhood plans are very good at protecting the open and green spaces that the community wishes to include. There is a great need to protect the people who spend a couple of years producing a neighbourhood plan, which is why I introduced a private Member’s Bill to take away the right of appeal if a developer has definitely gone against a neighbourhood plan.
I do not think the system is broken. We have gone out of our way to try to fix it. I would point to the fact that the viability calculations that developers have to produce are public. They are available and have to be discussed, and local councils should have access to them. I agree with what my hon. Friend said about carbon impact, but I believe—