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That this House has considered the future of the planning system and the upcoming Planning Bill.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummings.
I thank the Minister for being present and Members for taking part in the debate. I am very respectful of the Minister and I do not underestimate the challenges that he faces in changing a complex system. We need sensible reform, but we need to get it right, and it is in that positive spirit that I intend to speak. I will speak for no more than 10 minutes, because I want to get as many people in as possible.
I will reiterate some concerns and, significantly, suggest as many solutions as I can; some have been made by me and some by near 100 Members on the WhatsApp group. I sent those ideas to the Prime Minister and to the Housing Department a few weeks ago for thought, and I look forward to a response. I put forward an approach to planning based on three principles: that it should be community led, levelling-up led and environment led. I commend those to Ministers. First, however, I will outline some concerns.
Reform, I believe, is better than scrapping and starting again. Scrapping threatens to misdiagnose the problem. Nine in 10 planning applications are approved, but only 60% of permissions are built, so there are more than 1 million unbuilt permissions in a decade. The basic fact is that we have a flawed market. The building cartels, which build the majority of homes, restrict supply. That is not a secret; it is in their building model. They act to prevent prices falling. That is why using housebuilding alone, or predominantly, to lower prices will not work.
Furthermore, the standard method damages the levelling-up agenda. That is critical, especially given the Prime Minister’s excellent speech today. Levelling up is a moral and economic imperative. It is also a political imperative for the Government. However, a flawed planning Bill will undermine that levelling-up process. Some red wall colleagues are now beginning to see that.
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Cummins, and I thank the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for securing the debate.
I wanted to speak in this debate because I want the Minister to succeed and I want my community to succeed. I am here to offer support and help where we can get the solutions right. There are four key elements that I want to address: how we maximise economic opportunity, how we meet housing need, how we have transport integration and sustainability, and how we engage the community. Those are all equal partners and are all needed in how we take developments forward.
Looking at this issue, I think about our 45-hectare brownfield site in the middle of York. It is adjacent to the railway station and it is publicly owned land, so we can really do something innovative there for the future of our city, in order to address the huge inequality in our economy and to ensure that we get the investment right. Tragically, whereas 36,000 jobs are being created at Curzon Street and 37,000 jobs at Crewe, York Central will have just 6,500 jobs. That is only two and half times the number of houses being built; in Birmingham, nine times as many jobs are being created than there are houses being built. That says to me that we need to understand how we can use such sites for economic growth, and that we need consistency.
What is not happening? Housing is not talking to the economy, to transport or to the environment, and it is certainly not talking to our communities. That is what matters to take us forward, which is what I want to do. People in my city are being priced out of it, which is skewing the local economy. We cannot get the care workers we need and people to work in our hospitality sector and tourism, which is a major economic driver, so we have a negative cycle. Unfortunately, building luxury apartments, which clearly provide a quick receipt from public land sales, pushes up the rest of the market and drives people further away from our city, meaning that people cannot have the amenities and services that they need. We are moving into the wrong spaces, and it just does not work. It is a broken system, which is why I am looking for reparation, so that we actually use such sites to drive economic opportunity.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for securing this debate. He has already highlighted many of the points that I intend to raise. Like him, I am keen to work with the Minister to ensure that we have a solution that works for local communities.
Planning is broken in North Devon. We can illustrate why we need reform quite dramatically. We have a local plan, yet our local community does not believe in it; our local council votes against developments in the local plan, even though it is on brownfield sites. We have exceeded the number of houses that are built in the community, yet we have nowhere for local people to live. For over four years we have built more than we required, yet we still do not have places local people can live in. We have a conservation office and a planning department from which most developments take up to a decade to emerge.
We have always been a community that welcomes tourists and second home owners, but unfortunately that dynamic is now slightly tilted in the wrong direction. New builds are snapped up as second homes or holiday lets, sometimes by locals because they can make so much money. Why would they rent out a property for a few hundred pounds a month when you can make several thousand a week up here in North Devon?
Post pandemic, North Devon is one of the top 10 places in the country to move to, and I agree that it is a fantastic place to live. However, as the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) said, we need people to move here, to get jobs, to stay here and to build communities here with their families. Building homes is not about houses; it is about communities. It is not about a winter ghost town. Croyde, which boasts one of the best surf beaches in the country, is currently 64% second home-owned. During the pandemic, in the village where I live—where I am speaking from this afternoon—mine was one of just six houses out of the 30 in my close that was occupied. We also have derelict homes, as well as second homes and Airbnbs.
It is a pleasure, Mrs Cummins, to serve with you in the Chair. I congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this debate. I agree with his opening comments on the broken housing system and the stranglehold of the volume house buildings.
It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby). It was east Devon where Labour secured a memorable by-election win last week. I congratulate Councillor Jake Bonetta and the Labour team. It is, perhaps, wins such as these that are sending a shudder through the Government at the moment. Perhaps this is why the Prime Minister today ignored the unveiling of the hugely important national food strategy, in favour of trying to reassure Conservative MPs in the south that planning changes are not the political dynamite they fear. However, he has a job on, because if the mantra is “build, build, build”, and one characterises those who care about our countryside as newt counters, then one can hardly be surprised when they turn away to people who take a more considered view. It is not only in Devon: many newspaper columns have been written about the battle going on in Horsham, where the legendary Knepp estate fears that Horsham District Council will approve thousands of homes, while the council says that central Government have put it in this position.
We all agree that there is a problem with the current system, but many of us are deeply suspicious of the suggestions put forward in the planning White Paper last year, not least when one sees the level of donations made by developers to the Conservative party. According to The Times, the developer behind the plan at Knepp, Thakeham, has donated more than £600,000 to the Conservatives since 2017. “Build, build, build”—it is not hard to see why. Be in no doubt that I want people housed, I want affordable homes, I want council homes and I want homes of high environmental quality, none of which has been achieved by this Government.
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Cummins. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this important debate.
Before I consider the future planning system, perhaps hon. Members will allow me a minute or two of nostalgia. When I was first elected as a councillor to Great Grimsby Borough Council in 1980, just about every planning application went before the planning sub-committee, which met every two weeks and decided whether plans—large or small; a conservatory or a large-scale industrial development—should go ahead or be refused. During the intervening years, more and more decisions have been delegated to planning officers. One thing that people expect from those they elect to represent them is that they actually participate in those decisions and have a vote. Democracy has suffered and voters feel more and more that those they elect to use their judgment have been sidelined, and confidence in the system has waned. There is no going back to what may or may not have been the halcyon days of the Grimsby planning sub-committee, but what of the future? Communities feel that they need to be involved, but they recognise that their influence is limited. If they feel that the proposals that may come forward will further limit that influence, they will be apprehensive and oppose those changes. This is a massive challenge.
Thanks to the Government’s levelling-up agenda, areas such as mine are becoming more and more attractive to businesses. New jobs are created regularly; we have record funding through the Greater Grimsby town deal, tipping over the £100 million mark since the last election; we have gained freeport status for the Humber ports; and the Budget this year announced tens of millions of pounds for a new marine energy park. The end result will be more highly skilled, well-paid, sustainable jobs, which will create greater investment in the area, improving living conditions and requiring more housing.
It is a pleasure to serve under you as Chair for this important debate, Mrs Cummins, and I thank the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for securing it. As other hon. Members present will know, planning is an issue that really impacts our local communities and attracts a great deal of attention when contentious applications are made. However, the Government’s proposals limit accountability and local input in the planning system. The proposed changes will lead to local people no longer having the ability to formally object to inappropriate developments in their own street or neighbourhood, with participation limited to consultation on the area’s local plan every few years. They would remove the public’s right to comment on those individual applications, cutting opportunities for public engagement by half. That does not seem fair.
I will give the example of Ryton ward in my constituency, where we have a local plan for Gateshead, and where there is a very contentious housing development. It has been through the local plan, with land allocated for housing, so that was one leg of the argument gone at the application stage, but there is lots of detailed engagement on very specific proposals and conditions. I know, for example, that the people of Stargate—a small mining village—who are most affected, are seeing huge changes. Those changes are not to their direct benefit, but are having a huge impact on their lives. We need to ensure that people have the right to participate in those local decisions, not just at the principle level but at the detailed level, when something happening next door affects an individual’s life.
With nine in 10 planning applications approved by councils and—according to the Local Government Association—more than 1 million homes given planning permission but not yet built, it is clear that it is the housing delivery system that is broken, not the planning system. Raising the number of homes required without incentivising or compelling developers to actually build them will not lead to the provision of more homes, which brings me to an important point: a number of parties have identified that we really need to be funding our planning system effectively, so that the planners can deal with the applications. They are being held back by a lack of staff on some occasions, and I believe the Royal Town Planning Institute has made that very point and believes that zoning is not the answer.
It is a huge privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, and I thank the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for raising some massively important issues for all our constituents. I am speaking from just outside the Lake District in Westmorland, where we have always had a huge problem of excessive second home ownership and, indeed, the pressure that too many holiday lets can put on a local community. However, over the past 12 months that problem has become catastrophic.
We have been deeply concerned that Governments over the years have failed to acknowledge this problem, but surely now it is unmissable. To give an idea of the problem, over the past 12 months, estate agents I have spoken to say that up to 80% of all house sales have been into the second-home market. There are communities in my constituency where 90% of the homes are not lived in. We do not need to think too hard to work out what the consequences of even 30% of a community not being lived in all year round will be: they lose the local school because nobody is going to that school from the homes within that community, and they lose the local bus service, pub, post office and all the other facilities as well. These beautiful places can become ghost towns, but the problem has got so much worse in these last 12 months.
We have also seen the massive growth in the number of holiday lets. Here in the south lakes, we have one of the highest proportions of holiday lets anywhere in the country. That huge number has gone up by 32% in a year. As hon. Members have said, that has come about due to a variety of different sources, but in particular the Airbnb market.
Anecdotally, what does that mean? Constituents that I have spoken to in Ambleside, Kirkby Lonsdale, Grange-over-Sands and other places who had a private rented property costing maybe £600 to £700 a month find they are being kicked out, now that the evictions ban has ended, and they discover that the property is on the market for £1,000 a week on Airbnb. That is outrageous, and it is something that Government have the power to do something about through planning reforms that would actually make a difference.
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Knight Frank reported that the current methodology, the standard method,
“systematically disadvantages poorer parts of the country, particularly in the North and Midlands”.
The north has 23% of the nation’s population, but its housing need is estimated at not even 16% of the total, and its share of public expenditure on housing is barely 18% of the total. The housing infrastructure fund spends £115 per head in the east of England and an astonishingly low £4 per head in Yorkshire.
The standard method directs investment away from levelling up communities. It heats up the already hot and it cools down those people who need to be cooking on gas—pardon the analogy. Other people will talk about the potential loss of democracy and other concerns, so I will not dwell too much on them, because I want to focus on one or two specific issues, but it is clear from talking to colleagues that there is much variation in people’s concerns. For some it is green fields and damage to tourism or quality of life, and for others it is suburban density, building height or the absolute absurdity of building on floodplains. For others, it is a system that is simply not delivering affordable homes.
I will say that there is a slight frustration. Opponents of reform—well, opponents of scrapping the system rather than reforming it—are sometimes portrayed as nimbys. On the Island, on the Isle of Wight, we have been yimbys for 50 years—we have been in our backyard. We have increased our population by 50% in 50 years. In that time, the cities of Newcastle, Sunderland, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Blackpool, Birmingham and Stoke have all declined—not relatively declined but declined in absolute percentage and numbers. So when people say that opponents of a developer-led system in the south are nimbys, I respectfully argue that they should acquaint themselves with some basic facts about the history of development that has taken place in this country since world war two. We have barely no new infrastructure on the Isle of Wight, and our key gas supplies, water and electricity interconnectors are already operating at near capacity.
So what are the solutions? I want most of this speech to be positive. I will look at our three principles and suggest perhaps a dozen or 15 ideas in the time I have available. Some of them are community led, some environmentally led and some levelling-up led, but they all gel together to look at ways we can support the Minister in the important work that he is doing, which we want to support.
Our reforms are: first, enshrine the ability to object to individual planning applications; secondly, give greater weight to reforming neighbourhood plans; thirdly, outlaw gazumping. We know that communities with neighbourhood plans accept higher housing allocations because they see what is in it for them. We know that gazumping slows down the market and imposes costs. Good democracy and good law help good development.
On levelling up, there are many things one could say, but I will stick to one. We need to fundamentally reform the standard model and redirect infrastructure funding and housebuilding jobs to levelling-up areas as a deliberate act of policy. Without that, we will have to explain to our voters in a few years’ time why all that infrastructure funding, or so much of it, is going down south, and it will not be a pretty conversation with southern colleagues and voters or red wall and levelling-up communities.
Finally, a series of ideas linked to the environment. We need to end the use of lazy greenfield development. I know Ministers want that, but it would be great if they could want it more. We need a recycling culture in land use. I am aware that some good ideas in the White Paper are about infrastructure levies, but it needs to price in the true cost of using up very valuable rare greenfield land. For many areas I fear that will be a markedly higher price than will be factored into the Bill. We need, in short, to change the economics of land use.
We need a greenfield tax so that money goes into brownfield clean-up in a dedicated way. If we are using, especially in a place such as the Isle of Wight, rare greenfield land, we need to get a greater good out of it than Persimmon’s bottom line. We need to zero-rate brownfield development, encourage it and build in financial incentives, especially for small-scale brownfield in small towns and communities, to make it work.
There are many loopholes that I could suggest closing, but I will not, given the time. I will just say that we need greater powers of compulsory purchase to force people to act more quickly. There are 600 unused and derelict properties on the Isle of Wight. If the Minister wants to get 600 extra properties on the Isle of Wight, he should give the Isle of Wight Council more power. Make it easier for us to enforce action on derelict and unused properties in order to force sale or to force use. Introduce a character test to screen out dodgy developers. If he wants to clean up the system, let him be the sheriff who gets rid of cowboy developers.
Buyers who turn homes—I think this was suggested by a colleague who will be speaking shortly—into Airbnb or holiday homes should be required to apply to councils for change of use. Councils should be allowed to frame localised plans to reverse and lower the percentage of long-term holiday and commercial holiday rentals in specific communities.
We help first-time buyers, so why not last-time sellers with stamp duty exemption? It will cost money. One in five over-65s would be, according to facts and figures, more likely to move. That could affect 2 million people—£900 billion-worth of property. That would free up the market and allow market-driven solutions where there is not market failure. Clearly, there is an element here.
Finally, land banking. If we want to boost supply, we need to create a use-it-or-lose-it rule for permissions within a realistic time bracket. That means more than starting a development by digging a trench six foot by six. Agreeing a start date means agreeing just that and making council tax payable on all plots after a given date, regardless of whether they are built. If the purpose of the Minister’s planning Bill is to help developers, these ideas will not be attractive to many of them, but if its purpose is to get people into homes and to help first-time buyers—I am sure it is—these ideas, and many others suggested by colleagues, will help him produce a markedly better planning Bill, or a planning Bill that is as good and as attractive as we all want it to be.
We need solid principles behind the planning Bill. It should be community led, levelling-up led, and environment led. We need to be sensitive to local democracy. We need a levelling-up agenda that spreads prosperity and hope around our country. To make it environment led, we have to move away from unsustainable, lazy, car-dependent and carbon-inefficient greenfield development, and we need to build for communities and in communities.
Given its connections to the east coast mainline, the trans-Pennine route, Northern Powerhouse Rail and High Speed 2, we are told that York will be one of the best-connected sites in the country, and we need to take advantage of that. On housing, we need to ensure that we have a real match between the need in a local community and what is built. We are seeing luxury apartments that no one can afford, when we have a real housing crisis. We need to get the balance right. There is a requirement for 80% of developments to be family homes, yet they are not being built. Instead, we will see luxury homes, which will be moved on for holiday lets and Airbnb. Our city really does not want more Airbnb.
On transport, we need to ensure that the site in the middle of York is sustainable, yet 2,697 new car parking spaces are being placed in the heart of the city, which is sucking in traffic, making our air quality worse and jamming up our city. We cannot have that. All the people on the strategic board are not from York, and they do not understand our community. We need community voices right at the heart of planning decisions, to ensure that they can talk about their aspirations and their future. That is what levelling up has to be about, and that is what the planning Bill has to be about. I trust that this is what the Minister will enable to happen in the future.
We really need the council to have more teeth to stop new developments going to more second homes or additional Airbnbs and put in place covenants to ensure that local communities can build more family homes here in North Devon. We need them to be affordable so people can live here. Developing in North Devon is difficult; we are remote, we are rural, we do not have a big work force and it is hard to transport materials here. Overlay that with the time it takes to get things out of planning, and actually it is quite a hostile environment for developers. That is not to mention the opposition from many locals, who see that we do not need additional homes; we need the ones we have here already to be available to local people. We have developers facing death threats here in North Devon. We really do need some interventions to enable communities to reform.
The market is broken. In the village where I am this afternoon, a two-bedroom apartment in need of renovation is currently on the market at £750,000—with a communal garden. Something is not working here in North Devon. The final point I will make is that we need to find a way to ensure that councils can raise revenue when people wish to convert a property into a holiday let, and that there are more protections in the market. The private rental sector is now non-existent here; we need to find a way to ensure that there are more privately rented properties, as well as homes that are affordable for local families to buy. There is no point in coming on holiday to North Devon if we have nobody working in our bars and restaurants and nobody able to service visitors when they get here. Communities should not be full of empty houses for half of the year, they should be full of family homes.
There is much more to be said about planning and housing than can be said in three minutes, but I will highlight one glaring contradiction in Government policy that remains unresolved. I have challenged Ministers on this repeatedly and will try again today. In the Government’s much-delayed but initially worthy Environment Act 2020, there are good proposals to secure biodiversity net gain. They may not be as ambitious as some of us would like, and we have raised some practical concerns, but the principle is right and we support it. However, no one on the Government side has been able to explain how to get biodiversity net gain in a zonal planning system. When challenged, they evade the question. I do not blame them, because there is no obvious answer.
That is not me saying that; it is the planning experts. I refer to an excellent piece in The Planner last summer by Huw Morris, who asked how individual schemes will be environmentally assessed to provide the mitigation. They will not, will they, Minister? That is one reason why Conservative MPs are right to be worried. People in England want homes, and homes for their children, but they want our precious land protected too. I just say: beware the Prime Minister’s bulldozer—it is out of control and it is coming for some green space near you.
Like previous Governments, this one is faced with the demand for more housing and the resistance of local people to excessive development. I use the word “excessive” deliberately, as on the whole most people recognise the need for more housing. I also appreciate that, in rural communities, limited growth is required to support local services and facilities such as schools, post offices, pubs and churches. However, they also know that excessive development will overload local services, such as GP practices. It was good to hear the Prime Minister acknowledge that in his speech this morning.
I will give a current example from my constituency of how essential community involvement is to the whole process. North Lincolnshire Council has applied for levelling-up funding to deliver one of the council’s main projects—the western relief road, which is crucial to the continued expansion of the local economy. That road was included in the council’s local plan, but that local plan is unknown to most people: the whole process is a mystery, and they have more important things to do, getting on with their lives. Only last Saturday, I visited two constituents whose property could be severely affected by the road. I spent an hour with them, explaining the local plan and how it had been advertised and they would have been able to submit objections, but of course, like most people, it had passed them by.
I could take the Minister to the village of Wootton in my constituency, where he will see that every other house has an estate agent-style board in its front garden, objecting to another local application. If we are to involve communities, they must be part of the local plan process. Of course, we have to recognise the need for more housing, particularly for our younger people, but on balance I must urge the Government towards caution on this issue. They have the best intentions, and I will gladly work with them to achieve their aims, but caution is the watchword.
I want to speak specifically—the Minister would be surprised if I did not—about accessible housing, and the need for planning reform to promote accessibility. We must do much more to ensure that older and disabled people can live in homes suitable for their needs: that is essential for people’s independence and quality of life. Over the past year and more we have all spent a lot more time at home, especially vulnerable people, both older people and those with disabilities. However, sadly, new Government data published just last week—on 8 July—as part of the English housing survey revealed that a growing proportion of older and disabled people are forced to live in homes unsuitable for their needs. The Government launched a consultation on accessible homes almost a year ago, in September 2020, but we are yet to hear the outcome.
I will touch very briefly on the environment and the climate emergency. The planning system has a central, vital role in both addressing climate change and facilitating nature’s recovery, but the Government’s proposed changes do not properly address the needs of the natural environment. I fully support the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in calling for the Government to strengthen protection for sites already designated for nature, giving local nature recovery strategies material weight in the planning system and ensuring robust and fit for purpose environmental regulations.
What I am asking the Government to do—the hon. Member for Isle of Wight alluded to this earlier and I completely agree with him—is to change planning law. The Government should change planning law so that holiday lets and second homes are separate categories of planning use, and they should give the Lake District national park, the Yorkshire Dales national park, South Lakeland District Council and all planning authorities the power and the resource to police that, so that the leakage of those homes out of the family home market is prevented.
It seems outrageous that these beautiful places that we are so proud of, in our rural parts of the United Kingdom, can end up bleeding local talent and families and becoming places where only the wealthy can stay or visit. We wanted these radical interventions to happen years ago, but surely now these extreme circumstances mean that extreme and radical action is necessary. I add that the Government could copy what the Welsh Government have done—give local authorities the power to increase council tax on second homes to well above 100% and up to 200%, and use that revenue first to dissuade people from having second homes in certain areas, but also to invest in the schools, post offices and bus services that would otherwise close, so that we do not, by letting the market let rip, see communities like mine in Cumbria die through the lack of intervention.