Planning for the Future

[Sir Charles Walker in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Planning for the Future White Paper.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. There is a great deal to consider in the White Paper, which takes as its starting point the idea that the lack of progress in building the homes we need in this country is largely due to our system of planning controls and approval. I should declare an interest at the outset. I have been happily married to a town planner —a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute—for 18 years, which just goes to show that not all politicians are at loggerheads with town planners. I can see by the number of people who have applied to speak in the debate that the issues raised in the White Paper have generated a great deal of interest. As an MP for an urban constituency that none the less has more than half its square mileage covered by a national nature reserve I believe I have as much insight as anyone into the balances that need to be struck in our planning system between preserving our environment and building more homes.

The White Paper proposes a number of reforms to how planning permissions are granted. Among them are a proposal that development land should be divided up into different zones—growth, renewal and protected—each with different approval rules. That proposal will remove the ability of locally elected councillors to scrutinise individual applications on their merits. Engagement with local communities will instead be only in the development of the local plan. In the White Paper it is envisaged somehow that that approach will engage groups who have previously been excluded from planning decisions, although it does not give details of how that will be achieved.

There are many other contentious proposals in the White Paper and I am confident that each of the points will be fully debated during the sitting, but I want to make two specific points. The world faces a climate emergency—a fact that the Conservative Government have belatedly woken up to. Having spent a decade trying to cut the “green crap”, in the words of their former leader, the Conservatives have recently made encouraging moves towards recognising that the climate crisis is real, our environment is degrading, and it is high time our Government got on and did something about it.

Among the most urgent challenges facing us, not just as a nation but in partnership with other nations across the world, is that of cutting our carbon emissions. I welcome the Government’s commitment to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. That commitment was underlined by the Prime Minister’s announcement of his 10-point plan last month. There was also an announcement on renewables in yesterday’s energy White Paper. However, all those announcements are missing the details of the actual plan to get there. Where are the policies? Where are the interim targets? Where is the funding?

The areas that need to be tackled are well known. We need to decarbonise our transport, power generation, agriculture and industry; but above all we need to decarbonise our housing. We need a step change in how our homes are built, how we heat them and how we cook our food. There are two key approaches we need to take to combat carbon emissions. The first is to upgrade existing homes with better insulation and sources of heating and power. The second is to ensure that all new homes are built to net zero carbon standards. That standard was ready to go in 2015 when the Liberal Democrats left government but was rejected by the Conservatives in 2016. The Government are now returning to it, but promise only a 75% decrease in carbon emissions by 2025. A million homes have been built since 2015. In itself that is hardly suggestive of a planning system that impedes development. Those homes have been built without a zero carbon homes standard. All of them will need to be expensively upgraded in the future.

I am grateful to my near neighbour for giving way. She mentioned going back to existing buildings. Is she aware of the Architects’ Journal campaign to retrofit? That could be an idea. Does she share my concern that often design is sacrificed in all this? There was a report last year by the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, but it feels as if there is a possibility of ushering in the slums of the future. We need to emphasise more retrofitting stuff—and beauty, properly.

The hon. Lady makes some interesting points. The Liberal Democrats are absolutely committed to supporting policies for retrofitting—or upgrading, as I prefer to call it, as it is a slightly more future-focused look. I believe that the particular value of that policy is that it will benefit our lowest-income families the most. They are the ones who are living in the worst housing and who will benefit most from the reduction in heating bills that will result from, for example, better insulated homes. I am glad that she mentioned building design, because that is precisely the point I am making. If we can design our buildings from the start to achieve a net zero carbon output, those benefits would be there from day one and could be seen both in reduced carbon emissions and reduced heating bills.

The planning White Paper is a missed opportunity to do much more to embed this net zero carbon ambition into our planning policy and thus facilitate the step change that we need to see in our new housing developments. It is only through the constraints applied by the planning system that we can hope to see net zero carbon homes built by private sector housing companies that want to build cheaply and quickly.

The legislative framework already exists if the Government would only use it. The proposed planning reforms should bind together the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and the Climate Change Act 2008 to confirm that local planning authorities have a clear and specific duty to address climate change in their planning decisions. Carbon reduction would then become a material consideration in the planning process, enabling local authorities to reject applications that would not seek to achieve net zero carbon in the resulting developments, and the law could enable local authorities to go further if they wished by allowing them to put carbon reduction targets in their local plan.

The failure of the White Paper to explore opportunities to achieve net zero carbon in our housing is indicative of the Government’s failure to provide a proper plan to achieve their overall target of net zero carbon by 2050. However, it is not just a climate emergency that we face; we are also confronted by an environmental emergency. The threat to our natural environment has never been greater and the Government must do much more to tackle it. There could not be a better opportunity than a planning White Paper to make proposals about how we balance our need for housing and economic development with our need to protect our green spaces and wildlife.

Government-commissioned research from University College London has found that homes built through permitted development rather than by going through the planning process are also of worse quality. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is also a very regressive step rather than a progressive step?

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point, because it highlights the fact that the more we weaken the planning decisions made by local authorities at local level, the more we risk allowing unsuitable development, including architecturally displeasing development, environmentally damaging development and development that is not primarily designed to meet the needs of the local community. That is why bypassing local authorities is the wrong approach.

The planning White Paper proposes to bypass much local authority planning involvement in the mistaken belief that it is local nimbys who are blocking development. In my constituency, it is local people who have provided many of the ideas for local authority action that have improved our environment and guided planning policies. Local authorities, especially Liberal Democrat-controlled ones, are often willing to go much further than the national Government in reducing carbon and improving our environment. In Richmond and Kingston, for example, the councils have introduced new cycle lanes to encourage people to reduce the number of car journeys they make, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure to encourage the switch to cars with lower emissions. Liberal Democrat councils up and down the country are also planting trees, installing solar panels on the roofs of council buildings, switching council vehicles to electric, and insulating council-owned homes. In each case, they are responding to the needs of their own environment and that of their local population.

When the public inquiry into the handling of the coronavirus is completed, I believe that it will clearly demonstrate that some of the response could have been more effectively delivered by local authorities or neighbourhood groups. We have seen the weaknesses of a centralised test and trace system, for example, and even today the Government are setting central rules for school openings that might be better decided by local education authorities.

We have had a few drop-outs, so I will allow five minutes per speaker.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I thank the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this debate.

The proposed algorithm linked to the White Paper would more than double the annual housing target for the borough of Barnet to 5,744 units a year. That would place intolerable pressure on an area that is already building thousands of new homes—it is already playing its part in tackling the housing shortage. The numbers proposed in the algorithm for London and the south- east would be impossible to deliver without significant urbanisation of the suburbs, encroachment on the green belt, or both. They would inevitably mean the construction of hundreds of high-rise blocks of flats, changing the landscape and the skyline forever and permanently blighting the local communities that we represent in this House; the open, low-rise, leafy suburban environment could become a thing of the past.

Even before these reforms come into operation, there are currently around 3,500 new homes proposed, and at various stages in the planning process, just in my Chipping Barnet constituency. Strong opposition is felt, for example, towards development proposals for Victoria Quarter, Colney Hatch Lane, Whalebones and—most controversially of all—for the station car parks at High Barnet and Cockfosters, just over the borough boundary. The reality is that more or less every brownfield site is already in the pipeline for development; there is simply no space for thousands more flats.

Page 54 of the White Paper suggests that these astonishingly high targets might be delivered by redeveloping streets of semi-detached homes. They call it “gentle densification”. To come anywhere near delivering these numbers using such a method would require the mass compulsory purchase and demolition of suburban streets. That is not remotely realistic, is not acceptable, and would be anything but gentle.

It is a great pleasure to see you in the chair today, Sir Charles. I congratulate the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) on securing this important debate.

The last time we debated this subject, in October in the main Chamber, I talked about three main themes. I will cover broadly the same three themes today, but I hope to do so in a fresh and original way in the time available.

The first is that, with any algorithm or formula, of course it is right to look at the inputs, how the formula works and the logic of it and to see whether we think those things are right. It is also right to look at the output of that formula and, if it seems to jar with the original intention, to go back and look at the inputs and logic.

This is not the time and the place to do that. Constructing an algorithm in a Westminster Hall debate is probably about as sensible as design by committee, but all those aspects warrant a fresh look. That starts with very basic things, such as how we define affordability. Sometimes the median is not the most appropriate thing to use. There is a danger in a constituency such as mine, where median incomes are based to some extent on the incomes of people working outside the area, that if house building targets are driven based on those numbers, the result might be building more and more pricey larger executive homes that remain unaffordable to the people for whom the housing was intended to be more affordable.

In a constituency such as mine, and I suspect those of some others, yes, we need more houses. I think everybody these days accepts that we need to get supply and demand in better kilter. There is also an important question of mix and ensuring that as we increase those numbers that means an increase in houses that are genuinely affordable, in the sense meant by people who come to our surgeries. That is not only capital A Affordable as it is meant in the public sector, but affordable as in a home that I can afford to aspire to buy.

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the existing affordable home ownership product is a much better way of delivering social housing than the first homes proposal in the White Paper?

The hon. Member raises important points. There is a need for housing of all different types, sizes and tenures, and there are different ways of delivering them. In the time we have available, I am afraid we are not going to get to the bottom of evaluating them in an ordinal way.

The third and important point I want to make is about national parks. I do not know whether there are others here who represent national park areas. There is the particular issue where part of a constituency is in a national park and parts are outside, so there are very different constraints in how land can be used. There is a danger that if a housing target or requirement is set based on the entire area, containing both national park and non-national park, with different constraints on what can be done in each part, the result will be the insufficient creation of new homes inside the national park and potentially too much on the edge.

A piece of work came out from Nationwide a few weeks ago that suggested that house prices in national parks have something like a 20% house price premium compared with those outside. In a constituency such as mine that is a huge amount of money. The Office for National Statistics is doing some further work, so hopefully we will be able to develop those figures. It is also important for the areas just outside the national park. In my constituency, that means areas such as Alton and Four Marks, where there is potentially a disproportionate amount of development in the border zone that can put considerable strain on infrastructure and provision of service. It can then be difficult to ensure adequate provision.

There has been a lot of debate about the proposals. Ministers have been in listening mode and have been very good in listening to colleagues across the House. I hope, as the matter develops further, it will be possible to take these considerations into account.

You are all being very well behaved on timing, far too well behaved. I might have to lift the time limit.

I am grateful to be called in today’s debate, Sir Charles, yet again discussing “Planning for the Future”. I am surprised we are still here after the debate in the Chamber a few weeks ago, when there was deep concern across the House about the proposals, since the language painted a very different picture from the reality of what they would bring.

I want to focus on York, my constituency, and the real challenges we are facing with the whole planning system that will be exacerbated by “Planning for the Future”. The Government talk about giving back control and local people having a say, but when it comes to “Planning for the Future”, there is virtually no meaningful involvement. There may be consultation but certainly no involvement in the depth of planning decisions about their local environment.

Public engagement seems to be higher for individual planning applications than broader planning consultations. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be more democratic to encourage and facilitate public engagement at every stage and at every level, and that these changes will lead to more decisions being made behind closed doors and make things worse, not better?

I absolutely do agree with my hon. Friend, not least when infill housing development proposals come forward and there is actually very little accountability. That is why it is so important that local people have a say about their community—they know it best.

The reality is that whoever holds the cheque book holds the power in planning, and it is set to get worse under the proposed changes. I want to set out the problem that we are facing in York Central, in what would be a renewable area, and why the current system and “Planning for the Future” will fail York for generations.

Some 80% of housing need is for family housing, and I do not know a family that does not want a house with a garden, yet the planning for York Central will mean that 80% of housing is unaffordable one or two-bedroom flats—nothing that our constituency needs, despite over £155 million of public money being poured into the scheme—built on 45 hectares of public land. Already, under the current system, the housing is for investors, not residents.

That is nothing short of immoral when people are living in damp, overcrowded, poor-quality private rented sector houses. I was just looking at the figures: in York we have lost 45 socially rented homes, and that situation is getting worse with right to buy. We have a real housing crisis here, and this paper does not match our needs. These people have nowhere to go in York: if they cannot move out, which is the only option, they are left in this housing crisis; if they do move out, our local economy suffers, because we do not have the skills mix that our city needs.

York Central is adjacent to the rail station, which is one of the best-connected locations in the country; it is the mid-point between Edinburgh and London, a destination for HS2, if that is still going ahead—although today that looks uncertain—and at the intersection with the trans-Pennine route. If I look across to places such as Crewe or Curzon Street in Birmingham, the opportunity for creating jobs on these sites has been realised, and economic investment has been prioritised. However, York Central will provide just 6,500 jobs because the majority of the site is being handed over to housing.