New Housing Supply

Bob Seely Excerpts

Monday 5th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for a really fascinating speech and hope that the debate will be of equal quality. There is an issue with density. Garden cities are a fantastic idea, whether Hampstead garden suburb, Welwyn Garden City or the others, but we have some of the lowest density cities in the world. We are a small country with a high-density per-kilometre population compared with elsewhere in the world. How does he square that circle with the high-quality environment that he wants to see?

[Mr Davis]

Part of that fits in with what my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) said, but I will deal with the point about the high density of the population in a moment.

Let us talk about the politics of nimbyism. Today, in a village in my constituency, a small development of 100 homes would generate thousands of objections. That is inevitably what happens. A garden town could deliver tens of thousands of homes and, if put in the right place, would probably generate a few hundred objections. I will talk about how to minimise that, too. Such a scheme would be fruitless unless we can ensure that new developments generate the funding they need to become places where people actually want to live. That is key.

Part of the problem with the existing process is that a mass of potential funding for infrastructure can quickly disappear, captured not by the local community but by landowners and developers. As soon as a hectare of farming land gets planning permission, its value will shoot up roughly a hundredfold. That is the order of magnitude. It goes from £21,000 for the average hectare of agricultural land to an enormous average residential land value of £2.1 million per hectare—that is outside of London. However, the vast majority of that will go to the landowner and the developer. About 27% will be captured by the state, mostly by the Treasury—that is over and above the money brought in by section 106 agreements.

There is no guarantee that money will be spent locally. Indeed, there is almost a guarantee that it will not be spent locally—I am looking at my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke), a former Treasury Minister, as I say that. This system starves local communities of funding that could pay for necessary infrastructure within the development, such as schools, roads, train stations, GPs and hospitals, fibre optics or cycle lanes—you name it—or even funding that could pay for larger and cheaper homes, which comes to the point about density. The result is piecemeal development around existing settlements that lacks the proper amenities to cope.

The solution lies with the example I have referred to already, set during the 20th century. The construction of new towns was centred around radical but effective legislation that allowed new town development corporations to buy large tracts of land at their existing use value. That meant that when buying up farmland for garden towns, the corporations paid the agricultural use price rather than the hope value, or hypothetical market price. I want to propose a slightly more sophisticated approach, because I do not really like expropriation—I am a Conservative, remember. We will have to have some sort of compulsory purchase, but there should be a proper compensation for that.

Consider an example of a 1,000 hectare garden town, a little smaller than Welwyn Garden City. Purchasing 1,000 hectares of land at agricultural value would cost £21 million, but as soon as it has planning permission the value would rise to £2.1 billion—remember that number. There is no change to the underlying land usefulness and no work undertaken—that is just a change of planning permission. But a Government-created garden town development corporation might pay the existing owners, let’s say, 10% of the development value. That is still £210 million, so we are now talking about a pretty rich farmer. That is ten times the existing use value and a profit for him of £190 million, but it still leaves £1.9 billion of uncaptured asset value. That £1.9 billion surplus can be used to invest in the town’s infrastructure, schools, medical centres, parks, pedestrian walkways, high-speed optical links, and road and rail connections.

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[Mr Davis]

Well, that is the rest of the argument. My aim is to create a well-designed town, which is attractive to live in. I looked around my own part of the world and I thought, “I can see where they would go.” I am not going to say it publicly as I do not want to change the land values, but I could certainly see that.

These developments would be built in areas of comparatively low population. They will not be on top of an existing town, as my hon. Friend describes, so they can, to a large extent, sidestep the nimby problem. Even in cases where there is a hamlet near to a proposed site, considering the size of the surplus, it could be used to buy out those who are objecting, with a small premium on the existing market price, a little bit of help with moving and the payment being tax free. That would minimise the nimby problem.

It is not as though we are short of space for these new developments. As my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) said, we often hear that the UK is full or that further development risks damaging our beautiful countryside. I am afraid I do not agree with such arguments. My hon. Friend has been in a helicopter more times than I have, so he will know that if he flies from London to York or Hereford to York, or wherever he likes, if he looks out of the window he will see that unless passing over a major conurbation, it is like looking at a golf course. Only 8.7% of England is developed; in Scotland, it would be a tiny fraction.

[Bob Seely]

My right hon. Friend may find that that figure is disputed. When we look at motorway service stations and urban lighting, we see that urban sprawl means the number is significantly greater than 8.7%. That number represents a very narrow definition and there are people who would at least double it.

[Mr Davis]

Like all mathematicians, as I am, I always treat numbers carefully. My hon. Friend might note that I said, “Look out of the window of a helicopter.” If he does that, he will see what I am talking about—large amounts of free tracts of land. I am talking about not just any old land, but land near motorways, railway hubs or the old Beeching railway lines, if we wanted to rebuild some of those. There are a whole series of places where we could put people.

It is not just a numbers game either. As the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) and others have said, new communities need to have character. They need to be attractive to all sorts of members of society. Garden villages and towns make that possible. I am not necessarily trying to introduce another policy aim, but instead of shoehorning new houses into any nook and cranny we can find in existing settlements, we can build good-quality, spacious homes in new developments.

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[John Stevenson (Carlisle) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Mayor. I think this is a very important debate—[Interruption.] I do apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker; I was away with my local government head on there, rather than my parliamentary one.

Clearly housing matters. We should never forget that a house is a home, a place where people live as individuals and bring up families. Therefore, we want to see improvements in housing. We want to see increased quality and we want to see quantity improve. We want to ensure choice in social housing, in the rented sector and, most importantly of all, in the owner-occupier sector. We must also remember the other markets, such as the student let and the holiday let markets, that have a role to play in housing.

As has already been said, in many respects the solution is straightforward: we simply need to build more homes. However, I appreciate that there are barriers to achieving that.

[Bob Seely]

I have listened to all the contributions, and I am probably out of step with quite a few hon. Members here, but nobody is talking about the failure of the builders to build. The builders are getting the permissions in their tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, but they are land banking the permissions and the land promoters speculate on that. If we could tackle that, would we not get closer to solving the problem?

[John Stevenson]

I am not totally convinced that that is correct, but it is an interesting point that my hon. Friend makes.

I appreciate that in housing there is a degree of controversy in particular parts of the country, but we should be careful about making lazy assumptions. There is not a national housing market; there are many variations up and down the country. London is different from Manchester, Cornwall is different from Leeds. There are differences between urban and rural, and in many respects the housing market is regional and sub-regional. In my county of Cumbria, the Lake district is a very different market from Barrow or Carlisle. What is affordable also varies considerably depending on values, supply and of course salaries. Therefore, the housing market is a bit more nuanced than we sometimes think, and we must respect and consider that when we come to making policy.

It is also important that we do not see housing policy in isolation. Tax, whether it is council tax, stamp duty, capital gains tax or inheritance tax, can influence the housing market. How we organise our infrastructure and connectivity—train lines, roads, access to housing and housing developments, bus routes—also has an impact on the housing market. So too, most importantly, do businesses and economic and employment activity.

There are solutions, which hon. Members have already touched upon. I wholeheartedly agree that the responsibility for a local plan lies with the local authority and, if it does not produce one, one should be imposed upon it by Government. I think that is right. On tax incentives, we need to look again at our tax regime, particularly stamp duty and council tax, and hon. Members have already touched upon the planning rules that also need reform.

However, we also need to be bigger in our thinking. We need to think strategically. The Government need to be bold, imaginative, visionary and above all brave. We have an unbalanced nation, principally a north-south divide in our economic performance. The north clearly needs a great deal more investment, both public and private.

We have economically underperformed in the north for many years, but there are opportunities emerging. We have the green revolution, we have the energy policy and the prospect of nuclear plants, and there is an industrial renaissance—I hope—starting to happen. The northern economy is still 15% manufacturing, so there are opportunities. We need more business investment and we need to grow that economy.

The Government should make a commitment to build half a million new homes in the north of England and shift activity to those areas. To achieve that, we need better connectivity and greater incentive for business. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) about new towns. That is an eminently sensible solution. Garden villages can also be part of the solution, as can reclaiming brownfield sites.

I will give two little examples of what can be achieved. In my Carlisle constituency, we have a proposal for a garden village of 10,000 homes. That has been opened up by housing infrastructure funding that will improve the road infrastructure, which will release those 10,000 homes over the next 10 to 20 years. It is well supported: people want to see places such as Carlisle grow, because we need critical mass to support the services that we have in our area. We are, in many respects, an area that needs to attract a greater population.

I was involved with the borderlands growth deal initiative. There are 1.5 million people in the borderlands area. If we superimposed a plan of that area over London, it would stretch to Brighton and almost to Cambridge and Bristol—an area that contains more than 20 million people. There are opportunities for housing and places for people to move to, but at present we do not have the housing supply. With economic activity, private investment and public infrastructure investment—housing policy cannot be seen in isolation—that would be a win-win for all. It would take pressure off parts of the south, create a stronger north—fundamental to improving the overall performance of our country—create a more balanced country and, above all, create homes for all.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on securing the debate. He will be familiar with New Earswick outside York—the first garden village, and such a desirable place to live today. As York nears the end of its 77-year journey to secure a local plan, I hope that the inspectors look at Labour’s proposals to create new garden towns on the edge of York. That is very much in keeping with the history of our city, where we have 15-minute connectivity and the infrastructure—schools, healthcare and transport facilities—that we need to make the community work.

York has a significant housing supply challenge: along with a low-income economy, the cost of housing is exceptionally high. A single person can afford just 5.6% of properties, but finding those properties is a real challenge. Last year, the cost of properties in York rose by 23.1%—the highest rise anywhere in the country. That costs our economy and families. The challenges are not abating. The only difference is that last month York voted for a Labour council. We are committed to doing everything possible to build homes that people can afford to live in. We need to look at how we can develop supply, especially when it comes to starter homes and social homes.

I encourage the Government to ensure that, when analysing their consultation on short-term holiday lets, robust measures are applied to return lets to residential use. Today, 2,079 lets are being advertised across the York area, and we need those homes back in circulation.

Starting with land, Labour has set out its stall on compulsory purchase. Land needs releasing at scale and at pace, not just for local authorities but for housing associations. Too much is banked, and although that may be profitable for developers, it prevents much-needed house building. We need measures under which land is re-evaluated and brought into use—through compulsory purchase orders, if necessary. Too many are gaming the system. Although our policy and priority is “brownfield first”, green spaces—green lungs—must, where appropriate, be placed in the centre of our communities. That is so important for people’s wellbeing and mental health. We saw throughout the pandemic the price paid by people who were locked into high-density communities.

Secondly, we must address funding. In 2012, the Government imposed a housing revenue account debt on local authorities. Despite the HRA debt cap being removed, councils still have to put money aside to pay the debt and interest. The amount available for repairs and retrofit of existing stock is therefore squeezed, blocking the development of social housing, as that money has to be available to pay off the loan. That is freezing development in York and elsewhere.

In York, the HRA holds about 7,500 properties. The council had to pay for that housing stock using the Public Works Loan Board loan of £121.5 million, which demands £4.5 million of interest payments each year. We need the Government to address this issue, as it is restraining development. I urge that the debt is lifted from local authorities’ balance sheets, as it is choking off development opportunities and local authorities do not have the resources to meet the demands. The Government will respond that they have lifted the cap on the HRA, but borrowing will be at an even higher interest rate, so we need to see that debt moved to a different balance sheet. I want the Minister to respond to that point, because the debt is having a chilling effect. Local authorities also need greater flexibility with right-to-buy funding, with receipts currently capped at 40% to reinvest.

York’s income from its stock is only £30 million, so once we have addressed our old stock—retrofit and repairs—and put in sustainable measures, there is very little to spend on development without getting into greater debt with greater interest, so we end up with low build and a housing crisis, as many of our authorities face today. The Government need to build out at pace and scale, so we need to address refinancing. If we think about housing as an investment—and as a 60-year investment, because we want to build the quality homes that are needed—we start seeing the equations change, and that investment will bring forward not only housing but opportunity.

[Bob Seely]

The hon. Lady says that the Government need to build out. The Government do not have these planning permissions; it is the planning industry and the developers that do. How would she persuade the developers to build out? Is that not the issue?

[Rachael Maskell]

That is what I have been talking about; it is about the structure and the infrastructure of the building environment, which the Government do control.

Thirdly, the Government need to build sustainably. That can be achieved if Homes England is properly funded. I am grateful to Homes England for its time and for enabling me to see what it can achieve. It must not be underfunded, as it needs the right resources to build the required volume and to provide the injection of funding that local authorities need. We need adequate grant funding, as required by the local authority, to build volume at the necessary standard, rather than having to waste precious land—as we see on many sites—on luxury developments that are often set aside for the far east market as opposed to being brought into local use. We need to build according to need, so that we do not waste resources and build luxury developments that nobody can live in; that is a real frustration for my community.

Fourthly, we need to make the numbers count. Rather than having targets, we need obligations. The Government made a significant mistake in bringing house building numbers down to targets only, because the numbers we need to see and the scale we need to talk about will be drawn back.

On planning, we need to ensure that the larger developers are not just sitting on sites, stalling development and gaining on the land. We need to get those sites into use as quickly as possible. That has been a significant failing, because as prices rise, the market itself rises too; we are certainly seeing that in York. We need investment in planning departments. We recently took control of the council in York, and found that the planning department had been hollowed out. We do not have a chief planner and the department is significantly understaffed. Even if all the infrastructure is put in place, if we do not have the planning staff on hand, the opportunity for development will be stalled.

We need land, resources, workforce and ambition. In 18 months, Labour will build the homes people need, tackling the burning injustice of housing poverty, and realigning government priorities to create a new generation of sustainable homes. I trust government will move soon.

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[Mr Clarke]

I think the issue of land banking is something of a straw man in these debates, because I have never seen compelling evidence that it happens. I think the reality is that developers need a predictable land supply in order to have a programme of forward build, and that is what largely accounts for that question.

I do not want to make this a starkly political debate, but I am very conscious that it is often the hon. Lady’s party that is—I am afraid to say it—the worst offender when it comes to campaigning cynically against the development that we need. I refer colleagues across the House to the Chesham and Amersham by-election a few years ago to see just how detrimental that policy has been to the wider debate. Arguably, it was that election result that led to the disastrous removal of targets, which I think is what is driving tonight’s debate in the first place.

[Bob Seely]

My right hon. Friend talks about the planning system being the problem, not land banking per se. Does he accept the figures from Lichfields, which show that from getting planning permission, it takes eight and a half years for a first house to be built on a large housing estate, and that on average, a 2,000-home housing estate is built out by developers at a rate of 160 homes a year? It takes the best part of two decades to build out a 2,000-home housing estate. Is my right hon. Friend really saying that the development industry is not the problem?

[Mr Clarke]

I think it is much more about the developers seeking to make sure that they can sell the homes that they are building and about their having a supply of land predictably available to allow them to build into the future. Developers are obviously very constrained at the moment by the scarcity of supply.

The consequence of where we find ourselves is that, according to Schroders, the last time house prices were this expensive relative to earnings was 1876, the year that Victoria became Empress of India. That should make us all reflect on what kind of society we have become. Clearly, part of the problem is that we need to control immigration more strictly, and I strongly believe that the numbers announced just before recess were unsustainably high, but this is fundamentally a home-grown problem. Our society does not build the homes that we need to accommodate our existing population, and therefore we need to establish clear targets for housing supply. Doing so is not some kind of Stalinist five-year plan; it is the best way we have yet identified to prevent councils from backsliding on their responsibilities and caving in to what are often small, if noisy, pressure groups. It is my view that the regrettable decision taken by the Prime Minister last year to weaken those targets by removing their legal force was a mistake that has already had far-reaching consequences.

I am prepared to have a sensible debate about how we set our housing targets. We could change our approach and take as our starting point the existing occupied housing stock of an area and apply a rate at which it should be increased in line with the national house building target of 300,000 homes a year. Urban areas would see the highest levels of need, allowing a brownfield-focused policy, and no part of the country would be asked to contribute more than its fair share. This stock-led starting point for a standard method would remove the reliance on discredited housing projections, and it could be nuanced with carve-outs for AONBs, sites of special scientific interest and places with high concentrations of holiday lets or, indeed, where historic drivers of demand, such as university expansion, have ceased to exist.

One thing I would say is that we cannot insist that the green belt should be out of bounds wholly and completely, as the Prime Minister implied recently. The green belt was a 1940s mechanism to prevent urban expansion, pretty crudely drawn on the map. It is not—I repeat, not—a sophisticated environmental protection measure. It is, however, the beneficiary of effective branding. We have to raise awareness that about 11% of our brownfield land lies within the green belt and that 35% of the green belt is intensive agricultural land of minimal environmental significance. The public deserve to know that. Perhaps areas of the green belt that do not have genuine environmental value could be designated as orange or amber belt, capable of being developed in exchange for substitution elsewhere.

There are other things I could talk about. I could talk about the onerous nutrient neutrality rules, which are blocking huge swathes of housing from the Solent up to Darlington.

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[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

It is a genuine pleasure to be involved in this debate and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is not currently in his place, on bringing the debate to Parliament. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke) said, this is something that needs cross-party consensus, and I think that broadly we have achieved some degree of consensus over the course of the debate. That is important because successive Governments over the past four or five decades—perhaps even longer—of every colour and political persuasion, have tried to resolve the housing issue. Unfortunately, the interventions they have made have been probably no more than tweaks, which have further distorted the complex feedback system that is what we call the housing market. It is not really a market in the traditional sense. Indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson) noted, it could at best be described as a series of local markets, distributed pretty randomly around the country.

Most of the interventions that Governments have made over the last half century or so have been demand-side. We have had far too many demand-side interventions, which have just driven up prices and driven away affordability. We are simply not building enough houses in the right places and the shortage of housing supply has a direct impact on house prices. The cost of home ownership and renting has been rising steadily, outpacing wages and inflation. In the UK, the gap between house prices in high demand areas such as London and the rest of the country has doubled over recent years. So our market is broken. Land prices follow economic activity and drive up house prices.

[Bob Seely]

I apologise for intervening yet again. Developers restrict build-out in order to keep land prices high. Is not the answer a “use it or lose it” rule, or to put pressure on developers, or to find a market mechanism that makes developers build more quickly? There are 1 million outstanding permissions, 500,000 of which are on brownfield sites.

[Ben Everitt]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. I think he might be zeroing in on a particular aspect of the picture that I have painted of the broken market. The behaviour—or perceived behaviour, in some cases—of developers and builders is not necessarily the cause of issues that I have been discussing; it is more a symptom.

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[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I am going to break the consensus slightly, but not, I hope, in an unhelpful way.

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), who made some excellent points, especially about shops. This is one of the things that nimby rebels such as me raised with various right hon. Friends: the need to use the stock that we have. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) for securing the debate. I agreed with a lot of what he said, but it is not an “either/or”; it is an “and”—yes to new towns, yes to new villages, and yes to new green garden villages, towns and cities. But we also need to get the system working.

I take issue with those who say that this is a system failure. I think that, above all else, it is a market failure. I agree with the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) about the need for rural affordable housing, which is a massive problem in my patch. On the Isle of Wight we have doubled our population in the last 50 or 60 years, but we have never really built for locals. We need to prioritise local building, and I would overwhelmingly prioritise affordable housing. Yes, I would set lower targets, because we have an amazing landscape—75% of the Island is protected, and we need to maintain that protection—but we also need to look after our own people, which is especially important on an island.

I am going to throw out some facts. I know that we have a problem with house building in this country, but I do think that it is important to note some of the facts. I say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke) that we have built 2.5 million homes since 2010. Last year, according to the House of Commons Library, there were 400,000 first-time buyers, the best figure for 30 years; 829,000 people have been helped under this Conservative Government; and since 2015 we have built, on average, 222,000 homes a year. That is quite respectable, especially, dare I say it, in comparison with new Labour’s—according to the Library—171,000 homes a year. We have a problem, but those who say that we are not building, when we have built 2.5 million homes since 2010 and 222,000 a year since 2015, should slightly nuance the points they are making.

We know that other factors are playing a role in this. For instance, we have huge rates of immigration. When the net immigration figure is 600,000, unless we are building close to 1 million homes a year we are in trouble. As a sensible man such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland will know, the printing of money—quantitative easing—is very bad news because it leads to inflation in house prices and assets. Interest rates have been too low for too long. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) will also know, we have a problem with second homes.

In the few minutes that I have, I will rattle through a few more points. What do I mean by “market failure”? Following the crash, 70% of supply is delivered by the 10 largest developers, and they are responsible for a vast number of our planning permissions. According to the surveyors Lichfields—a very respectable outfit that does a lot of the thinking on this sort of thing—it takes 20 years to build out a housing estate of 2,000 homes, and the period between the initial permission and someone having their first home is eight and a half years. I am sure that we could speed that up. Much of this is due to developer slowness. There is then a build-out rate of 150 or 160 homes a year. That means that a developer who is granted a 2,000-home planning permission now will finish the development in 2043.

Is there something we can do to speed up that process? Should not a builder with a good reputation who has a small brownfield site and is going to throw in some social housing, or who is working with affordable housing, go to the front of the queue? A builder who says that they will build out very quickly will bounce the big developers into better behaviour. I wonder whether there is much more that we could be doing.

I want to say a few things about the so-called nimby rebellion—which I do not think was very nimby, and I am not even sure it was a rebellion. We had a few issues, including a significant issue with something that pains me: the lazy developer reliance on greenfield, low-density, out-of-town housing estates, because they are unsustainable. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) made an impassioned and eloquent speech, but when it comes to greenfield land, where does “develop, develop, develop” fit in with our climate change agenda?

We know that high-density cities provide a critical way of reaching net zero, but we have some of the lowest-density cities in the world. Sheffield’s population density is one tenth of Barcelona’s. That is an extraordinary statistic. Sheffield has 1,500 people per square kilometre, while Barcelona has 16,000. They are both slight outliers, but London has 8,000 or 9,000 people per square kilometre, while Paris has 12,000. Newcastle, Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham have about 3,000, while the density of Valencia, Basel, Milan, Bilbao and Geneva is almost double that. So we have a problem with density in our country.

Then there are top-down housing targets. The problem with those is that developers game the system. They get the permissions, as the hon. Member for North Shropshire said, and sit on them for eight or nine years. Then they come back to councils such as ours on the Isle of Wight and say, “You haven’t built, so we are going to push through more.” That system is not working.

But what else do the so-called nimbys want? We want greater powers for compulsory purchase. We want Government to say to lazy developers who sit on places for years, “You have six months to build out or we will put the place on the market for you.” We have also strongly recommended a character test for builders, so that a bad builder who does not treat people with respect or who does not build will not get the permission. We want more focus on smaller sites. We need still more focus on the half million brownfield site properties. London is particularly bad; it is building a quarter of the homes that we need, which is stifling the targets and the numbers.

I love the idea about properties above shops. We said that to the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities when we were negotiating for this, and we want more emphasis on that. We also want more emphasis on affordable housing so that councils such as Shropshire and mine on the Isle of Wight can force this stuff through. Rather than being nimbys, what we are doing often is finding a better way to fix the system. That could include plans for last-time sellers. If someone is old and they want to downsize, they could pay a significantly reduced rate of stamp duty. This would encourage people to free up the market. We could have 50-year or 30-year fixed-rate loans so that people would know what they were getting. Last year, before interest rates started going up, although house prices were rising, interest rates were low and housing was statistically relatively affordable, historically. It is less affordable now because interest rates have gone up to 5%, a historic average, rather being at a historic low. I hope the Government stick to the agreements. There is a lot that we can do to free up the market and to make the market work, rather than just attacking the system.

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[Bob Seely]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way to a disgruntled Back Bencher. If he reads the NPPF letter, the “Dear colleague” letter, he will find that although there is leeway on housing targets, there is set to be higher density and more liberalisation in many areas. A lot of what we tried to achieve was to free up the market to make it work better.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I fundamentally disagree with the hon. Gentleman on that. Whether it is by means of the emphasis in the proposed NPPF on locally prepared plans providing for “sufficient” housing only, the softening of land supply and delivery test provisions, the ability to include historical over-delivery in five year housing land supply calculations or the listing of various local characteristics that would justify a deviation from the standard method, the intended outcome of those changes is to allow local authorities to plan to meet less than the targets that nominally remain in place.

As I said, the choice the Government made entails a deliberate shift from a plan-led system focused on making at least some attempt to meet England’s housing need to one geared toward providing only what the politics of any given area will allow, with all the implications that the resulting suppressed rates of house building will have on those affected by the housing crisis and economic growth more widely. The next Labour Government will fix this mess. When it comes to housing and planning, our overriding objective will be to get house building rates up significantly from the nadir we will surely inherit, including, as part of that effort, markedly increasing the supply of affordable homes and, in particular, genuinely affordable social homes to rent. We do not intend to pluck an annual national target out of the air and ineptly contort the system to try to make the numbers across the country add up, as the Government have done by imposing an entirely arbitrary 35% uplift that most of the 20 cities and urban centres in England to which it applies are clear cannot possibly be accommodated.

[Bob Seely]

rose—

[Matthew Pennycook]

I will not give way.

But we will insist that the planning system is once again geared toward meeting housing need in full. To that end, if they are enacted as expected, a Labour Government will reverse the damaging changes the Government propose to make to the NPPF in relation to planning for housing. However, although reversing those damaging changes to national planning policy will be an essential first step, more far-reaching reform will be required if we are to overcome the limitations of a speculative house building model, a broken land market, and a planning system that is at once both too permissive and too restrictive. That will mean, among many other things, overhauling England’s dysfunctional planning structures so that the system more effectively facilitates strategic housing growth across those sub-regional areas with significant unmet need. That might be by way of extensions to existing urban settlements or entirely new settlements—I would argue that we need both in good measure. It will mean more proactive public sector involvement in housing delivery on large sites across the country, so that quality place making and long-term value creation become more than just the rare exception.

Let me make it clear, Madam Deputy Speaker, that Labour’s approach will not be premised on a drive for units at any cost. We appreciate that many local communities resist development because it entails poor-quality housing in inappropriate and often entirely car-dependent locations, without the necessary physical and social infrastructure for communities to thrive, or sufficient levels of affordable housing to meet local need. We would argue that that outcome is a direct consequence of the Government’s over-reliance on private house builders building homes for market sale to meet overall housing need. Yet when it comes to house building, there need not be an inherent trade-off between quantity and quality. A Labour Government will be determined to see increased rates of house building, but equally determined that much more supply comes via a long-term stewardship approach so that, if not removed entirely, public opposition to significant development in contested areas should at least be much reduced.

Similarly, we reject the notion that building more homes must come at the expense of wider national policy objectives. In addition to increasing housing supply in a way that prioritises quality of build and quality of place, we will act to ensure that the housing and planning systems play their full part in addressing other pressing national challenges such as the drive towards net zero, the need for urgent nature restoration and the need to improve public health.

To conclude, it is not the only way of solving England’s housing problems and it certainly will not be a panacea for them, but building more homes remains the most effective way that we have of tackling almost all of the housing-related problems with which our country is contending. The Government needed to build more homes before the so-called planning concern group extracted its damaging concessions late last year. As a result of the Government’s appeasement of that group, we now face the very real prospect that house building rates will plummet over the next 12 to 18 months.

We desperately need a change of approach, but it is a change that the present Government and the Ministers on the Front Bench are incapable of delivering. It is high time that we had a general election, so that they can make way for a Government who are serious about ensuring that we build to meet housing need in full and boost economic growth.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Rachel Maclean)]

It is a pleasure to respond on behalf of the Government. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) for securing this important debate. It is a tribute to him that so many people have come to the Chamber to reflect the experiences of their constituents and to speak about local housing conditions.

I thank the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western); the two former Housing Ministers who spoke, my right hon. Friends the Members for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) and for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke); the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley); my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer); the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury); my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey); the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan); my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson); the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell); my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt), for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay) and for Waveney (Peter Aldous); my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford); and my hon. Friends the Members for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) and for North Devon (Selaine Saxby). All of them gave thoughtful, constructive, knowledgeable and, in some cases, rightly challenging contributions.

The points that have been raised today have underscored the importance of this Government’s mission to drive up housing supply and to deliver on our manifesto commitment of delivering a million additional homes by the end of this Parliament. They have emphasised the urgency of our work to build more homes of all tenures in the places where they are so desperately needed. [Interruption.] Is somebody trying to intervene?

[Bob Seely]

I was looking for a point to come in to show my support for the Minister. I remind her that this Conservative Government have averaged 222,000 homes a year, when new Labour managed about 171,000. Therefore, even when we are doing allegedly badly, we are still 50,000 ahead of Labour.

[Rachel Maclean]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, which I was just about to make.

The Government remain committed to our ambition of delivering 300,000 homes a year—homes fit for a new generation, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden said. I agree with him: as a Conservative, I support a property-owning democracy, and despite the economic challenges of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and global inflation, we have made real progress towards that target. In 2021-22, more than 232,000 homes were delivered—the third highest yearly rate in the last 30 years. Since 2010, more than 2.3 million additional homes have been delivered. That is the achievement of a Conservative Government, and it is fantastic compared with the woeful record of the last Labour Government.

At the same time, we are not complacent about the scale of the challenges that have dogged England’s housing market for decades, as many hon. Members have mentioned: demand outstripping supply, local shortages and residents being priced out of the places they grew up in. That is why we have committed £10 billion of investment to increase housing supply since the start of this Parliament to unlock, ultimately, more than 1 million new homes.

Hon. Members will know how committed the Government are to the supply of affordable housing. I think every single hon. Member who spoke referred to that. That is why, through our £11.5 billion affordable homes programme, we will deliver and are delivering tens of thousands of affordable homes for both sale and rent.

Moving on to the specific campaign or proposal from my right hon. Friend—