Housing Development: Cumulative Impacts

Wednesday 17th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Derek Twigg in the Chair]

14:30

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the cumulative impacts of housing development. 

It is good to see you presiding once again, Mr Twigg. Let me start with the obvious statement that in this country, and in all of our localities, we need more housing. There has been population growth, and in our constituencies we want there to be customers for shops and people to work in them, and places for people growing up locally to be able to move into. We also recognise that people move, which is important for labour mobility. Part of the population growth is about net immigration, but a big part is about increasing longevity—people living longer—and part of the need for more housing is the tendency of people to live in smaller households.

Overall, the record of housing delivery for both Labour and Conservative Governments has had its ups and downs. Both Labour and Conservative Governments suffered from major disruptions—in the case of Labour, the crash of 2007-08, and in the case of the Conservatives, covid-19. However, the peak of the modern era in net additions to housing was the 249,000 achieved just before covid under a Conservative Government, against the peak of 224,000 under Labour just before the crash. The target the new Government have in place is one that has not been achieved since the 1970s, and they are falling far short right now. The provisional number for 2024-25 is 209,000, which is a 6% fall on the previous year of 2023-24.

There are aspects of what the Minister outlined in his announcement yesterday that could help to address the shortfall, but I believe that it is inconsistent with the way that the formula currently skews development towards rural areas. What do I mean by that skew and how does it come about? Overall, the Government require a 50% uplift in housing numbers, but in the 58 mainly or largely rural local authorities, the average increase was 70%. In East Hampshire, which I represent, the target doubled, from 575 a year to 1,100.

Meanwhile, urban and major conurbations saw a much lower increase, at around 16% to 17% on average, and quite a few places saw a fall, including much of London and Birmingham. To be clear, that is not correcting a historical imbalance. Looking back over 20 years, the proportionate addition of dwellings per 1,000 households has been greater in predominantly rural areas than in predominantly urban ones. We also know from analysis by the Resolution Foundation that tilting development towards cities is good for economic growth.

Why is it a problem to have a skew towards rural areas? First, let us acknowledge that when we talk about rural land, this is not land that is typically sitting there doing nothing. It is not idle; often, it is farmland. Of course, these days we are more acutely conscious than ever of the necessity for food security. It is also the home for nature, and important to biodiversity. The countryside is an amenity for everyone, whether they live in the countryside or in a town. We will be back in Westminster Hall tomorrow to debate the legacy and significance of Jane Austen. The countryside of the constituency that I represent is what inspired Jane to write her great novels, and it still brings many people to the area.

Yes, there are protected areas of countryside, but it is not only about areas of outstanding natural beauty or national parks—the majority of rural areas are not in one—nor is it about the green belt. In East Hampshire there is a lot of green, but there is no green belt. We have a further complication, in that the district of East Hampshire is shared in Parliament between myself and my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford). The South Downs national park represents 26% or 27% of pre-existing housing and population in the district, but represents only 15% of housing completions in East Hampshire since it came into being. That creates extra pressure just outside the national park, in places such as Alton Holybourne, Four Marks and Medstead, which I will come back to, and in Horndean, Clanfield and parts of Rowlands Castle.

The Minister and I have had an opportunity to discuss this issue previously and I am grateful to him for his constructive engagement with it. I think that East Hampshire district council is right to assume that in the future there will be a split in housing development, reflecting where the pre-existing population and housing were. There is a 74% and 26% split. However, the council cannot do that for affordability. Unaffordability is significantly more acute inside the national park than outside it. However, I am not here today to talk about the national park primarily, because the bigger problem that is driving these issues is the total target.

We now also have effects of the duty to co-operate. It is possible that even with that split between 74% and 26%, the part of East Hampshire that is outside the national park might still get asked by the part that is inside the national park to take on more of its burden, and it is obliged to engage in those discussions constructively. However, we also now have other nearby authorities asking East Hampshire, and by the way a couple of other more rural authorities, to take on more of their housing numbers. So, we have this crazy situation whereby, with all the targets having gone up, people are looking to a district such as the one I represent to take more of their housing. But I should also say that none of those authorities have had an increase in their housing target as large as the one that East Hampshire has had.

We also have looming over us the effect of local government reorganisation. I think that some people see local government reorganisation—the merging of districts and boroughs into larger unitary authorities—as an opportunity and a way to address some of these problems. I fear that that might be a false hope. In fact, the creation of these large authorities might deepen or even embed some of these issues, with more housing being moved into countryside that will then be lost forever.

I will briefly give a case study of one area; it is not the only area where this situation applies, but it is a particularly striking example. It is Four Marks and Medstead. There is a grouping called Four Marks and South Medstead—it is called that in the planning document—and it is in tier three in the settlement hierarchy. It has already had a great deal of housing development. In the 2014 local plan, Four Marks and South Medstead had 2,030 houses and the target in the plan for the period to 2028 was 175 houses. The total number of new houses that have been built since 2014 is in fact 592, which is three times the original target. However, with further permissions and applications, there could be a great deal more houses. Indeed, there could be up to eight times the target and a two-thirds increase in the size of the settlement, and we even hear of further applications on top of all that.

What are the effects of that extra development? It takes a lot for a single housing development to change a local environment, but cumulatively a number of smaller developments can change the whole character of an area, which is at odds with paragraph 187 of the NPPF. And this is not just about character and landscape. It is also about practical matters, such as the A31 and being able to turn right on to it, or the capacity of the waste water treatment plant and the electricity substation at Alton.

I have talked about Four Marks and South Medstead. In the other part of the parish of Medstead, Medstead village itself and its surroundings are in tier four in the settlement hierarchy. There was no specific target for it in the plan, because Medstead village was put together with other villages. However, I have seen speculative applications for a number of sites in that area, particularly in the new land availability assessment.

So why is cumulative impact not being considered in all these developments and proposals? The main time that cumulative development is taken into account is, of course, at the time of plan-making. With speculative developments, when the cumulative effect is not considered, there is a risk that the developments do not meet the economic, social and environmental objectives set out in paragraph 8 of the NPPF.

The East Hampshire district local plan was adopted in 2014 for the period up to 2028, and the update process started in 2018. There have been some delays, including most notably as a result of covid. The key point is that under the old, pre-2024 housing targets, East Hampshire had a five-year housing land supply and the 5% buffer. We then got a rapid doubling of the housing targets. There is now no five-year housing land supply—there is a 2.9-year housing land supply. Given that we have doubled it, the only way we could still have a five-year land supply is if we had previously had a 10-year land supply, and I doubt that many local authorities can say that. That is why, although I am talking about East Hampshire, other colleagues may mention other areas; East Hampshire is clearly not alone.

Since the big increases in a number of the targets for different areas, I understand that most councils do not have both an up-to-date local plan and the five-year housing land supply. Speculative development is therefore probably happening in lots of places around the country, but it is especially concentrated in our rural areas, because they have had the biggest increases in targets.

East Hampshire is currently developing its new local plan. It expects to reach regulation 19 stage in the summer of 2026 and for the plan to be operational in August the following year. Until the local plan is finalised, the tilted balance principle means that the council is required to approve sites unless they can be said to be not sustainable development—a high bar indeed. Each application can be considered only on its own merits and in relation to its individual impact on traffic, sewerage and the rest of it. The council cannot consider the cumulative effect of, say, five smaller developments that might together be the equivalent of one big one. It cannot say, “Because we have already allowed these four, we are not going to allow the fifth.”

While I have the floor, I want to mention something that I have mentioned in passing to the Minister before: that the way the formula works does not encourage a change in the housing mix towards more actually affordable homes. To be clear, in areas like mine, we want more affordable homes. When I say “affordable”, I mean it in both senses of the word. What I call “capital-A Affordable” is the sense known to the public sector: social rent and part ownership. There is also “affordable” in the common English sense of the word—the affordability of housing as it is often expressed to us by our constituents in our surgeries, which is to say homes that young families can afford. Although not everybody does, most aspire to home ownership; I would wager that most hon. Members in the Grand Committee Room today had that aspiration to become home owners and did so.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

On affordability, I was at an open event for a development plan—a large development, as it happens—north of Dorchester, which will fundamentally change the natural characteristics of the town. On the display presented by the developers, the phrase “affordable housing” was actually in quotation marks. That was almost an acknowledgment of how ludicrous that statement is in relation to what is actually affordable for local people. Does the right hon. Gentleman think we need a better definition of what is affordable that is based on what is locally achievable?

[Damian Hinds]

I know the hon. Gentleman’s constituency quite well—he is my mother-in-law’s MP. I know what a fantastic and beautiful area it is, as well as some of the challenges with the local economy. He makes a very good point.

[Alison Taylor (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that affordability is linked to supply and demand? That is part of the reason why the Government wish to increase the supply, which in turn will bring prices down.

[Damian Hinds]

Of course, I agree. It is sometimes frustrating to talk to people who say there is no link between aggregate supply and the price of housing. Of course there is, but there is also the question of the mix, which is what I want to come to.

Other things being equal, the best returns for developers tend to be on larger, costlier homes, and new builds are generally more expensive than the existing stock of housing. In East Hampshire, the median price of the current housing stock is an expensive £430,000, but the median price of new houses is £530,000. With development and the increase in stock at a local level, median house prices therefore go up. The formula then calls for more of the same because of how it measures and treats affordability, so it becomes a cycle in which we still do not get the lower-cost homes we need. It could even be said that developers have an incentive to keep the unaffordability ratio increasing, because that extends the pipeline further into the future. I ask Ministers to look again to create incentives for quality, lower-priced housing.

I have three straightforward, reasonable asks of the Minister. The first and most important is, of course, to rebalance the formula away from rural—not so there is no rural, but so the balance is right and we do not have targets that mean an unrealistic amount is put into the countryside. It is about having that balance, which requires changing the formula.

I asked that of the Minister yesterday, and he was good enough to give me a pithy and clear single-word answer, which was no. I get that, unless and until it changes, the policy is what the policy is, so the answer is no. However, I ask him to reflect further and think about it, not to conflict with Government policy but to complement and support Government policy. A change in the formula—moving back towards the urban, from the rural—would actually support what he is trying to do, including the spirit of what he outlined in yesterday’s statement.

My second ask is to change the way the formula works on affordability, to remove the perverse affordability factor I mentioned. Affordability looms large in the overall formula, as it has had its weighting increased, but this is specifically about removing the perverse effect I just mentioned, whereby building more actually makes an area more unaffordable in the eyes of the formula, which therefore increases the target. I think the Minister will say that local authorities can do that in their plan making, but we need it to be systematised to find a way to require a change in the mix of housing so that we get homes that are more in reach of people growing up in rural areas.

Finally, in the meantime, as the targets have increased so much and so quickly—the five-year housing land supply in many areas could not possibly have increased nearly so quickly—we have a lot of speculative development. Therefore, pending the change in the formula, will the Minister give guidance stating that local authorities should consider the cumulative impact of all developments together?

14:48

[Alison Taylor (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for the opportunity to contribute to this important debate.

First of all, the right hon. Gentleman spoke about supply, and eventually land prices will drop, given supply and demand. House builders are having to keep house prices up because they bought in at a higher land price, and we hope that supply increases will drive prices down. In my experience, there will always be compromise in development. It will need pragmatic and collegiate teamwork between local authorities and, I dare say, Members of Parliament.

I will focus on a particular aspect of house building, which is jobs. The country needs more homes, more of the jobs that will be created, and the investment, infrastructure and services that come with that. The Environmental Audit Committee reported last month on its investigation into cumulative impacts, and I was privileged to participate in its comprehensive and cogent analysis.

I particularly want to focus on the importance of jobs and careers in the house building sector. As well as jobs for tradespeople, there is also a need for planners, surveyors and ecologists. As many in this House know, I spent my career before Parliament as a surveyor, latterly involved in large, mixed-use sustainable brownfield development as a fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. I have spoken before of the importance of skills, training and, especially, apprenticeships, which is unfortunately an area that the previous Government allowed to decline. Although the need for housing is urgent, it is clear that meeting that need comes with many challenges. Solving those challenges begins with understanding them and refocusing our effort to overcome them.

I know from visiting West College Scotland in my constituency that local colleges are enthusiastic to meet the challenges of training and skills. They are ready to adapt and deliver, and they are resourceful and innovative. They will rise to the challenge of delivering the new skills and emerging approaches needed to assess and address the cumulative environmental impacts, managing data and collaborative working. Employers need confidence to recruit apprentices across the board, including many trade apprentices. I hope to see many more level 7 apprenticeships in planning, ecology and surveying skills.

I have seen at first hand the value to employers of apprenticeships over traditional routes into surveying. I have seen young apprentices thrive in the workplace while making a real contribution to real projects alongside their learning. With the foundation of a good apprenticeship, the lives of hundreds of young people will be transformed. Although I appreciate how much more needs to be done to ensure that we protect the environment while building the houses our country needs, the rewards to the United Kingdom go well beyond building homes. Let us not forget the significant beneficial cumulative impacts of housing development.

14:52

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair today, Mr Twigg.

We all recognise the need for genuinely affordable housing, but progress cannot be measured in house numbers alone if it leaves communities worse off. Wing Commander Ian Derbyshire from Payhembury recently contacted me after his wife, who is in her mid-70s, received a letter from her GP surgery in Cullompton to inform her that she had been removed from registration. She had been registered as a patient at Payhembury for over 20 years. Wing Commander Ian and Mrs Derbyshire had written twice to the Cullompton practice to find an explanation for why they had been removed from the surgery’s list, and they were advised to register with a practice that would perhaps be more distant from them. The reason they had to move was simply that new housing had been built between them and the GP surgery to which they were registered.

This is not a unique case. Another resident of Payhembury, aged 89, received an identical letter. It was only after my office made contact with the GP practice that the surgery explained the reason for these residents being reallocated. Mrs Derbyshire has significant memory problems. She finds comfort and reassurance in familiarity, and the prospect of moving GP surgeries, having to retell her medical history, navigating new systems and building trust from scratch fills her with dread. Indeed, this is where joined-up government has to come in, because the NHS knows it is good practice in primary care for patients to see the same doctor over time.

Wing Commander Derbyshire served as an RAF officer for decades. He and his wife moved around the world for 34 years, repeatedly being uprooted by service to our country. Now in later life, when they look for some stability, they are being displaced once more, not by a posting or indeed war, but by a lack of anticipation.

When houses are approved, built and occupied, GP provision lags behind. When surgeries reach breaking point, their current patients pay the price. That cannot be right, particularly in places that have been identified for significant additional housing, as in Cullompton, where we anticipate that over 5,000 new homes will be built as part of Culm garden village in the decades to come.

Under the current planning system, house builders are not automatically required to meet the capital costs associated with additional GP capacity. Local authorities can negotiate section 106 planning obligations with developers to secure financial contributions, but that is not built in. Indeed, these obligations are not obligations; they are discretionary and must meet strict legal tests of relevance, necessity and proportionality. In practice, that means housing growth outpaces the delivery of new or expanded GP facilities in places such as Cullompton.

We must not allow new housing to undermine the provision of healthcare, nor can we allow it to undermine the natural spaces that play a role in keeping people healthy and easing pressure on the health service. A report in The Guardian in October put the UK down as the fifth worst country in Europe for access to green space, because of the loss of it due to development. New housing must not come at the expense of nature or of protected landscapes, and any attempt by the Government to dilute these safeguards will be met with firm and determined opposition. We can and must build new homes for this country, but not by forcing the elderly from their GPs, by eroding our green spaces or by displacing the very communities those homes are meant to serve.

14:56

[Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), my constituency neighbour, for securing this debate.

Housing and planning are among the issues I hear about most from my constituents across Farnham, Bordon, Haslemere, Liphook and the surrounding villages. I do not hear about it in the abstract or as a theory, but in the very practical terms of pressure on schools, GP surgeries, roads and the character of their towns and villages. As my right hon. Friend said, this debate is not really about whether we need more homes. Of course we do; it is about where, how and at what cost.

Targets that ignore local reality do not solve the housing problem; they export it. In my constituency, which spans East Hampshire and Waverley councils, housing targets have more than doubled under the Government’s planning framework. Councils are left with a stark choice: rewrite their local plans at speed or have them overridden by the system. In East Hampshire, the annual requirement has jumped from around 570 homes a year to well over 1,100. In Waverley, it has risen from over 700 to nearly 1,500 homes a year. That is not gentle growth; it is a near doubling of development in a predominantly rural or semi-rural area.

The consequences are entirely predictable. Schools are already full. GP practices are struggling to recruit. Hospitals are under strain. Roads designed for villages and market towns are now expected to function like urban arteries. Yet the infrastructure is simply not there. We are being asked to build the homes first and hope that the roads, schools and GP surgeries turn up later.

What makes matters worse is the sheer imbalance in where this pressure is being applied, as has already been mentioned in this debate. In London, housing targets have been significantly reduced, in some cases by around half, despite London facing the greatest housing demand in the country. Cities are best placed to absorb growth—higher density, established public transport, major hospitals and universities, and the ability to scale infrastructure alongside development. By contrast, market towns and rural districts are being told to carry a disproportionate burden. That does not fix the problem; it just shifts it on to communities that are least able to cope.

Take East Hampshire. Around 57% of the district lies within the South Downs national park, which means the remaining land outside the park is absorbing an ever-greater concentration of development. Places like Liphook in my constituency are being stretched to breaking point, and even towns that are ripe for development, such as Whitehill and Bordon, are under pressure because housing development is accelerating faster than services can keep up. Protected countryside on one side, relentless development on the other—that is not planning; it is pressure cooking our communities.

If we are serious about meeting housing need, targets must be fair, realistic and aligned with local capacity. Growth should go where infrastructure already exists, not where it is weakest.

There is also a serious issue of public confidence. Where councils cannot demonstrate a five-year housing land supply, the Planning Inspectorate almost invariably sides with the developers, regardless of the strength of local objection. In those circumstances, residents rely on their local authority to defend them robustly. I was deeply concerned when a controversial development in Haslemere was approved on appeal, despite well-documented objections and its location within the Surrey hills national landscape. What compounded that concern was the response of the Liberal Democrat leadership of Waverley borough council, which wrote to residents telling them to “move on” before all reasonable avenues to challenge the decision had been explored. That is simply unacceptable. When residents are fighting for their community, “move on” is not leadership; it is surrender.

Labour’s new targets risk collapsing trust in the planning system, rather than restoring it. Councils that claim to stand up for local people must actually do so when it matters. We will not build the homes we need by riding roughshod over communities, overwhelming infrastructure and eroding faith in our local democracy. We need a planning system that is credible, balanced and rooted in reality—one that builds homes in the right places and at the right pace, with the infrastructure alongside them. If we fail to do that, we will not just fail to meet the housing need, we will leave communities paying the price for decades to come.

15:01

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for bringing attention to this important issue. As far as local planning authorities are concerned, what matters is not the national target for housing but the local target as set by the standard method. At heart, the standard method compares local house prices with local wages. With a little jiggery pokery, that produces a number allegedly related to local needs. Unfortunately, the standard method is an especially bad way to devise a housing strategy. It was bad when the Conservatives invented it, and it is no better now under Labour, now that the numbers have been tweaked to produce even higher results. Far from solving the housing crisis, the standard method is the direct reason why we now have 1.4 million unbuilt permissions—wrong permissions in the wrong places at unsaleable prices. The more we load further badly allocated permissions on to what is already there, the worse it will get.

My constituency of Horsham will be granting new fantasy permissions on the edges of estates that do not exist yet and may not do so for decades to come. Multiple new estates will be attempting to attract customers within a few miles of each other. Of course, each new estate slows down the build-out rate for what is already there, so the net gain in housing delivery is questionable. It is also the most wasteful way to use land that one could possibly come up with. Most local planning authorities, like Horsham, are obliged to choose from whatever sites private developers promote to them. As a result, we are plagued with edge-of-town suburban developments that cost too much when they are built, and take up too much land in the process. Relying on private developers to bring down house prices always was a grossly over-optimistic strategy. And guess what? It is not working.

In Horsham, we have also been faced with a unique additional circumstance called water neutrality. This started with a ruling by Natural England that came out of the blue, prohibiting any increase in water abstraction from our main source in the Arun valley, in case it compromised a rare wetland habitat. For a four-year period, Horsham district council was not allowed to approve any new development at all if it increased water consumption by so much as a single litre. Needless to say, that was a stiff challenge to meet. As a result, the council slipped from being one of the best in class for housing delivery to one of the worst today. Extraordinarily, throughout this whole period, planning inspectors continued to assess HDC against its centrally mandated house building target of a little more than 900 a year. They took no account at all of the reason why the houses could not be built. It was literally against the law for Horsham to obey the law, and that was a gross injustice that remains uncorrected.

A few weeks ago, just as abruptly as the water neutrality was imposed, it was lifted. Horsham has now been left exposed to almost unlimited speculative development because we are so very far from being able to show a five-year land supply—it is probably under one year now. The immediate major consequence has been the approval at appeal for 800 houses at a site known as Horsham golf and fitness village. That development was not included in the emerging local plan, because it was judged to fatally undermine the green gap between Horsham and Southwater. It has no school or clinic and is on the wrong side of a dual carriageway. It is also barely half a mile from a much larger potential site for 1,200 homes, known as West of Southwater. The Southwater site is in the local plan and does have the relevant facilities. That is the site that should be built on.

Because the Government have thus far refused to help Horsham out of its unique problem, we have a chaotic situation of planning by appeal. The whole strategic logic of plan-led development is in jeopardy in my area. There is no present way for Horsham district council to argue the impact of cumulative housing development, because there is always a presumption in favour of development for almost anything that comes forward, as previous speakers have mentioned.

In the worst case scenario, it could be several years before Horsham has an approved local plan, by which time untold damage will have been done to our strategic planning and countryside. Under the previous Government, Ministers seemed to confuse water neutrality with nutrient neutrality and nothing was done. To his credit, the current Minister understands the situation perfectly well. We still do not have a solution, however.

That is very disappointing because a solution would be easy to implement and could be done without compromising the Government’s overall housing ambitions. In fact, I believe it would deliver the Minster’s intentions more completely. The Minister has already kindly agreed to meet me in the new year. I hope we can have a satisfactory conversation and find a solution to this problem, which is grossly unfair to the people of Horsham. There has to be a way forward.

15:07

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for setting the scene so well. I will obviously bring a Northern Ireland perspective on the impacts of housing development. I want to be fairly positive about how we do things; it is important to understand what we are doing in Northern Ireland and for us to understand what is happening here across the water.

Housing developments are foundations for social stability and improving the economy. I have a close working relationship with many of the developers back home, especially in Newtownards, where there is substantial development in Comber and Ballynahinch at present. There will always be difficulties. By their nature, housing developments bring imponderables to the local communities and associations. It is about how we address those things. I have often had meetings with the developers and local community groups to try to iron out some of the problems. We understand that the planners are independent; they sit between and make the decisions. Representations can also be made to planners as an individual. By and large, we have found those meetings to have gone well.

I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on healthy homes and buildings, which is committed to ensuring that homes are healthy, better environmentally and more efficient, and that they have green areas, playgrounds, car accessibility and charging points. All those are part of building somewhere that people can have as a family home for a lifetime, which is what we are trying to achieve. I make that point because there is a real need for social housing, which I want to illustrate. Housing should never be for private development alone. There has to be a social housing trend, portion or section.

As of March to September 2025, there were 49,000 applicants on the Northern Ireland Housing Executive waiting list, with 38,000 in housing stress with immediate need. That gives an idea of the situation. I have been fortunate to have 400 social housing units built in my constituency, although that does not really reach the need. When we have developments, there needs to be an understanding that there must be some commitment from the developer for social housing needs within that. I would like to hear the Minister’s thoughts here on the mainland about what is being done to ensure opportunities for those who are more likely to rent a house than to buy one.

The other issue in Northern Ireland, particularly in my constituency, is that house prices have risen more than in other parts of the United Kingdom. In my constituency of Strangford, house prices are among the highest in the whole of Northern Ireland. I can speak for my constituency, and the house price increase is shocking. The other issue I have found is that mortgages are quite clearly almost beyond the reach of those who want to buy a house. I know that the Government have committed to ensuring that there is help for first-time buyers, but in Northern Ireland I do not see much of that help. I ask the Minister, respectfully as always: what can be done to help first-time buyers to get on the first rung of the ladder?

I bought my house back in 1987, which is when I finished it. When I tell Members how much I built it for, they will say, “My goodness me. Is that possible?” It cost £27,000 then and today it is worth over £325,000. That house is no longer mine—it is my brother’s; I have moved to the farmhouse—but the point is that there were opportunities to build a house at that price umpteen years ago. I remember very well that when I left school, there was a man who came to Ballywalter to live. He bought my father’s coal business, and I got to know him—I was only 16, so the couple were “Mr and Mrs”. He built his house—in 1971, so not yesterday—for £3,750. A four-bed house—my goodness. I remember saying to him—as we did in those young days, at 16 years old—“Mr Dowds, how will you ever be able to pay your house back?” How wrong was I? In 1971, the price of houses was much smaller, and if he had been able to buy two of them, he would definitely have been quids in.

[Alison Taylor]

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech. When it comes to young people wanting to get on to the housing ladder, does he agree that five cuts to interest rates is a good start for this Government?

I also totally agree with the hon. Gentleman about more positivity in terms of working with local authorities to find solutions. After a 30-year career in property development, I know that development is never easy. It is about finding pragmatic solutions and working together, and there is a role for the MP to get involved, working with our local authorities.

[Jim Shannon]

I intervened on the hon. Lady in the Chamber yesterday and she has returned the compliment today in Westminster Hall. I recognise what she say—and by the way, I do not take anything away from the Government. I support their target of 1.5 million houses, whether or not they reach it, because it is important to have housing and opportunity, whether for social housing or first-time buyers. I welcome the Government’s commitment. It is not about negativity; it is about how we can take it forward in a positive way.

There are many positive impacts of housing developments, including job creation, local economic growth and investment attraction. However, there are some other crucial aspects that must be taken into consideration. For example, with new housing, there will be a loss of green space. I understand that, but I also understand that people need to have housing to live in. There will be water and air quality issues, pollution, traffic congestion, new infrastructure in the form of roads, clinics, schools and maybe small shops as well. They are all part of this, but if we work with developers and have that in our plans and work with councils, then hopefully we can agree a way forward.

Multiple new developments can overwhelm roads, junctions and parking, leading to congestion and increased travel times. A whole new ring road is being built outside my town, Newtownards, which will open up housing on both sides and create opportunity. Another development in Newtownards, which will have 670 houses, will connect to the last part of that ring road, which is really important —[Interruption.] Sorry, Mr Twigg. I am coming to an end. We also have to get water, electricity, gas, broadband and waste disposal.

Although housing development is essential to meet the needs of a growing population and support economic growth, we cannot overlook the cumulative impacts of multiple developments. Only by balancing the benefits of new homes with careful consideration of their combined impact will we create resilient, thriving communities where people want to live, work, grow and play.

I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts. He is very assiduous and always gives us good answers to our questions. I am keen to hear whether he has had an opportunity to talk to the Minister back home in the Northern Ireland Assembly—I know he does not have responsibility for what happens here in England—to see whether we can learn from each other.

[Derek Twigg (in the Chair)]

Before I call the last two Back Benchers, let me say that I will be calling the Lib Dem spokesman no later than 3.30 pm.

15:15

[Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for securing this debate.

We have heard several contributions about the cumulative impacts, which is an important term. Although the impacts come within the planning remit, they are often not given the priority that they ought to have. In fact, they ought to be the prime consideration in any new development.

I welcome the Government’s proposal to develop more than 1.5 million homes over the next five years, because in the city of Birmingham and my constituency, Birmingham Perry Barr, the housing shortage is an enormous problem. Somewhere in the region of 25,000 families are living in temporary accommodation. I often hear about split families, with the husband and some children living in one part of the city and the wife and some children living in another part, so housing is an important and desperate need.

Building new homes is not just about the bricks and mortar. Other hon. Members have eloquently set out the other important infrastructure necessities, so I will not repeat that, but I want to talk about a development in my constituency. The athletes’ village was meant to be a legacy project. It cost somewhere in the region of half a billion pounds, and it was meant to deliver 1,200 to 1,400 family units. It was originally meant to be used by the athletes arriving to participate in the Commonwealth games, and after that the properties were, in tranches, going to become social and affordable homes.

Hon. Members have already talked about the word “affordable”. When I graduated, I started my first job on an income of, I think, about £14,000. I purchased my first home at the cost of £30,000, and I was able to pay off the complete mortgage within a number of years. Developers now give people the option of purchasing 50:50, so they get a mortgage for half the value of the property. “Value” is the buzzword, because the value of the property is determined by the area in which it is built. Affordable homes are not really affordable; that word often gets used to make it seem like people can get on to the property ladder, but they are not really offered much.

The athletes’ village was, at first sight, an extremely welcome development. It would provide extra units that we desperately needed in that inner-city area, but the problems are now emerging. It was not planned very well. In London, it is acceptable for tower blocks with many units to be built because there is the transport infrastructure, and people are used to going out and doing small amounts of shopping—that is the lifestyle—but for residents of Birmingham it is an enormous challenge. The families who live there were essentially blackmailed into taking on those properties. If a band A homeless person is given the option of taking on a new home, they will bite the council’s hand because they would rather be living in a permanent new home than temporary accommodation. Some of that temporary accommodation is absolutely awful.

The families are now struggling, because they have no parking spaces. Residents on one neighbouring street are up in arms, because some of their parking spaces have been taken. It is becoming very toxic, and a number of vehicles have been vandalised. It is causing serious problems in the local community. I have taken the issue up with the acting chief executive of Birmingham city council, and we are looking at ways to deal with the matter.

I will not take up much more time, but I would welcome a meeting with the Minister, or a member of his team, to see how we can resolve this issue in Birmingham Perry Barr. It will require additional support—perhaps to acquire some land so that we can resolve parking issues. This is just one of the issues we get when we do not think properly about the cumulative impact. That should be paramount. Once again, I thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire for securing this valuable debate.

15:24

[Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for securing the debate.

The subject of cumulative development has reared its head in my constituency very recently. On Saturday, I hosted a public meeting about plans by Martin Grant Homes to build more than 200 homes on the area known as Saunders Lane—green-belt land between Hook Heath and Mayford in Woking. The venue for the meeting was Mayford village hall, and people were queueing out the door. There were hundreds of people—standing room only. The response was overwhelming, and the message from my community was clear: people are united in not wanting to lose these green-belt fields forever.

The area is already poorly connected and struggling with weak infrastructure as it is—let alone with significant housing development. My residents are deeply concerned about the impact on the local environment, the transport system, wider public services and the character of the area.

On top of the objections to the Saunders Lane plans, there are concerns about the cumulative impact. Only on the next road, Egley Road, 86 homes and a 62-bed care home are under construction, and there is a planning application for 74 new properties. In the very same village, about half a mile down the road, there is planning application for 200 retirement homes and a further care home on Sutton Green golf club. Because all the applications are speculative, the cumulative impact has not been considered.

My local authority, Woking borough council, has started to draft a new local plan, in which locally elected councillors and local people can decide where we build the homes we need. The developers, including Martin Grant, are wrong to pre-empt that fair and democratic process and take away the right of my constituents to shape the future of our area. Because they are pre-empting it, we cannot assess the cumulative impact.

I will be writing to the council and the developer to summarise what happened at Saturday’s meeting and urge everyone to put forward their views. It is blindingly clear that local people feel strongly about where they live. The community is very much alive and well in Mayford, and I am proud that I could respond to and lead the community in such a manner.

Woking is keen to build homes. We have given planning permission for well over 2,000 properties, which are not being built. Planning permission is not the problem in Woking and many other constituencies; the problems are in the construction sector. Will the Minister reassure me and my constituents that we in Woking can be allowed to shape our area, agree which green fields the local plan will protect, and say where development should happen, without being overturned by decisions from Whitehall?

15:24

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this important debate. It is a truth universally acknowledged that an MP in possession of a majority, however big, must be in want of a debate, so I am full of admiration for the right hon. Gentleman staying tomorrow to debate Jane Austen in Westminster Hall. As for myself, I am hoping to get away before that, so this will be my last appearance before Christmas. I therefore take the opportunity to wish hon. Members, the House staff who look after us so amazingly well, the officials, yourself, Mr Twigg, and even the hon. Member for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes) a very merry Christmas, although I know he would prefer that my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) were here instead of me.

I say with some hesitation that I am hoping to go home before that, because it has been something of a week for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. I am not quite sure how the Minister is still standing—he is sitting down now, but must need a break. Knowing the Minister’s prodigious amount of activity this week, perhaps tomorrow we will have three Bills and two White Papers coming out and I will be brought back here, but hopefully not. Yesterday, we were debating quarrying and planning—it was a blast. I did not know that I would be getting up and sitting down so many times on MCHLG business this week, but one could say that the Chairman of Ways and Means shapes our destinies, rough-hew them as we may.

I will move on to the more serious points of the debate about the cumulative impact of housing development. I fear that it is worse than the right hon. Member for East Hampshire surmises, because although I remember from my A-level economics that, in a perfect market, increasing supply should reduce price, we need to remember that in any locality in the country, we do not have a perfect market in house building. We have usually one supplier, maybe two, controlling the supply of homes to the market, drip-feeding them to sustain their prices. Any private house builder that went into business to reduce prices would rightly be punished by their shareholders. Putting private house builders in charge of reducing house prices is a bit like putting Herod in charge of childcare. As another seasonal reference, I am forced to consider what would be the cumulative impact of stables being used under permitted development for change of use to emergency temporary accommodation for young mothers.

The point that I think the right hon. Gentleman is really getting to with cumulative impact is the prolific number of permissions that are coming about outside the plan-led process. The plan-led process is so important because it is where cumulative impacts can be properly gauged and established. Any development that is not in the local plan, unless it has an environmental impact assessment, is not going to carry out a cumulative impact assessment. That is why we are so concerned that the Government’s recent announcements will undermine that plan-led process, with so many loopholes. To take one example, there is the abolition of the town centre-first approach for retail development, but there are many others that will undermine that plan-led process.

There is a particular need to look at the cumulative impact when it comes to flooding. The Environmental Audit Committee has recommended that the Government revise the guidance on the cumulative impact for flooding for this very reason. Many of the developments being discussed will not carry out cumulative impact assessments because they are outside the local plan or are sub-EIA development. I ask the Minister whether and to what extent the Government will carry out that review. Flooding is a massive issue for Rockwell Green and Hilly Head in my Taunton and Wellington constituency, which has been flooded twice in the last five to 10 years. We need to see a proper cumulative impact assessment of flood impact and flood risk.

[Cameron Thomas (Tewkesbury) (LD)]

The cumulative impact of development in Tewkesbury is nothing less than a threat to the continuing viability of Tewkesbury as a permanent settlement. The Environmental Audit Committee recently produced a report on flood resilience in England. Would my hon. Friend join me in asking the Government if they will implement recommendation 89 to make water bodies statutory consultees on development?

[Gideon Amos]

My hon. Friend makes a massively important point—absolutely, they should be statutory consultees. He gives me the opportunity to raise an even more serious concern. From careful reading of the Government’s snappily titled consultation on statutory consultees, alongside the ministerial statement of 10 March this year, it appears—I hope the Minister can put me right—that they are considering cancelling and withdrawing the direction that prevents councils from granting planning permission, against the advice of the Environment Agency, in flood risk areas. They are certainly consulting on that basis, so I hope the Minister will clarify whether that is the intended approach and how many homes in flood risk areas he expects will be permitted, against the advice of the Environment Agency, if they go ahead with that change. It is a very serious matter and could affect areas across the country—not only Rockwell Green in my constituency, but places far further afield.

My hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) made excellent points about the need for cumulative impact to be properly considered. My hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (John Milne) felt that plan-led development in his constituency was in jeopardy. I agree: after yesterday’s announcement, I feel that plan-led development is in jeopardy everywhere. The Saunders Lane development in Woking is a classic example of where proper consideration of cumulative impact is required.

The Liberal Democrats would pursue a different approach. Cognisant of the market conditions that exist in relation to private house building, we would focus on public investment in a programme of 150,000 social and council rent homes. In fact, we have never met the housing figure of 300,000 per year, except when we have had a big programme of council and social housing. With that element missing, private house building has bubbled along at more or less similar levels; third sector housing has increased somewhat. The big missing element has been council and publicly funded social homes.

For the reasons that I have set out, without a massive injection of such homes, we cannot rely on private house builders to increase supply in any meaningful way, however many permissions above and beyond the 1.4 million homes that have planning permission already, but are not being built, are given out. That figure, as my hon. Friends have explained, so clearly and starkly demonstrates why the challenge is not the issuing of planning permissions, but how to get those permissions built out. We urge the Minister to use much stronger “use it or lose it” measures to tackle unbuilt permissions. I welcomed the statement that he made in the summer about taking forward such measures, but we have yet to see anything really happen in that regard.

We need to remember those who cannot afford homes, and that however many private house builders provide more private homes, 99% of them will be out of reach of people who cannot afford a first home. That is why we need there to be social homes, but we also need a new generation of rent-to-own homes, so that people can get on the home ownership ladder at an early stage in life.

With that, Mr Twigg, I once again wish you a merry Christmas.

15:33

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on raising this important issue for debate today. He and I—as well as our hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) —represent stunning Hampshire constituencies, with renowned countryside walking routes and picturesque towns and villages. I still reckon I have the better deal, as my constituents have the “Costa del Hamble”, but I know that my right hon. Friend would definitely say the same about his patch.

May I briefly respond to something that the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos), said? I do not know whether he planned it as an early Christmas present for me, but the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) walked in while he was speaking. That was a good thing to see.

My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire has instilled in me a sense of déjà vu, which demonstrates the length of time that he has been campaigning on these issues for his constituency. We had a Westminster Hall debate before, and he is right that he cross-examined the Minister, who gave a very pithy response yesterday in the NPPF statement. I know that my right hon. Friend works very hard for his constituents, to make sure that he can get them the acquiescence that they seek from the Government.

I congratulate East Hampshire council on developing a local plan and, now, taking the responsible step of renewing it. That shows the kind of leadership that is needed. However, my right hon. Friend raised a number of important points, and I hope that the Minister will answer them. First, he asked about affordability, and about the rise in speculative development because of the lack of five-year housing supply, but the new targets have completely ripped up and undermined the plan-led approach to spatial planning, which the Government are rightly seeking and which I would argue forms the backbone of the planning system.

My hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon said that planning is a huge issue in his postbag. I, too, have that issue, and I suspect that Members from across the House who made brilliant speeches this afternoon also have that issue in their constituencies. It is love of our communities and respect for their unique characters that brought us all here to the Chamber today.

My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire and I know that our constituents are not against building more homes in principle—there is a clear need to build many more houses up and down the country; that is a simple fact—but people are asking for the right houses to be built in the right places, and for community resources and infrastructure to be invested in to sustain a growing population, a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon made in his contribution. That is why it is so important that we properly assess the impacts of housing development. When multiple housing developments are lumped together, they overwhelm communities, stretch scarce resources and dilute the character of our towns. Over time, people begin to lose their vital sense of belonging and communities lose their identity.

The house building sector makes a substantial contribution to the economy. In 2023, new house building generated £53.3 billion in economic output across Great Britain, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs in house building firms and their contractors, as well as the wider supply chain. But economic benefit depends on stability, confidence and deliverability, and an approach that relies on unrealistic targets, rising costs and declining affordability risks undermining the very industry the Government claim to champion.

The impacts of housing developments manifest in numerous key areas. One huge concern, which I receive countless emails about from my constituents—no doubt all Members present can say the same—is the environmental impact of housing developments. The Government had the chance to address such concerns through Lords amendments 38 and 40 to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which my Conservative colleagues in the other Chamber supported. However, the Government chose to ignore them, leaving unanswered questions about the environmental harm of their planning process.

We know and agree that ripping up the green belt is not the answer. Once the green belt is lost, it is lost forever, and that is why my Conservative colleagues and I have called for the swift redevelopment of brownfield sites, something that—to give the Minister credit—he did address yesterday in the NPPF update. The Campaign to Protect Rural England’s “State of Brownfield” report showed that we have more brownfield land now than in previous years. It highlighted that in a substantial number of local authorities, there is enough brownfield land with planning permission to meet the housing targets set by the Government’s standard method for calculating housing need for at least the next five years.

The Government’s plan for new homes disproportionately places the responsibility on rural communities to reach their target, as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire outlined. The 2024 reforms to the national planning policy framework, introducing mandatory housing targets and a new standard method for calculating local housing need, redistributed top-down housing targets to rural areas from urban areas by Government diktat. As my right hon. Friend outlined, East Hampshire council’s targets doubled, while London’s housing allocations were cut by 11%, Birmingham’s by 38% and Coventry’s by 55%. In Eastleigh in my constituency, which has already built more than is required, the allocation is up by 42%, and in Fareham in the other half of my constituency, it is up by 62%.

That is particularly concerning given that, as my right hon. Friend outlined, many younger people whom we want to achieve and get on the housing ladder want to live in metropolitan urban centres. I am pleased that the Government listened to the calls of the Conservative Opposition on the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill Committee. We called for an incentive for densification in urban centres; it was rejected by the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Peckham (Miatta Fahnbulleh), but now the Government have come forward with one, which we welcome.

The point that my right hon. Friend made is that Government regulations and Government legislation are competing against each other. I hope that the Minister will answer my right hon. Friend’s challenge. The new NPPF will designate and allow urban densification, but housing targets in rural areas have massively increased, acting as a competing objective. Which is more important—the NPPF or the housing targets? If housing in towns, in which it is much easier to regenerate and to increase housing numbers, is to be increased, housing targets cannot be uplifted greatly in rural areas but reduced in urban centres.

[Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)]

In my constituency we have had a 113% increase in our housing targets. A seven-year land supply has now dropped to little over three and a half years, making us susceptible to the very speculative developments that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Does he share my concern that in the circumstances in which speculative developments come forward, we lose the opportunity to plan strategically the infrastructure upgrades that a community needs, and each development brings only a small, incremental increase?

[Paul Holmes]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire and my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon made that point, I was about to make it, and the hon. Gentleman’s Liberal Democrat colleagues also made it, so there is universal acclaim for his claim, but it is also absolutely correct. I hope the Minister addresses that.

As the amount of housing increases, community infrastructure and resources must be expanded accordingly. That means more schools, GP surgeries, train and bus stations, hospitals, paved roads, bin collections and street lighting, to name just a few of the essentials. The list goes on and on; those are just some of the things we need to consider when looking at where to build. We must get better at prioritising those vital services, while recognising that not every development is right for the area it is proposed for.

We all know that under section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, as amended, local authorities can secure investment to fund new services and infrastructure in the local area, but the system is struggling to keep up with demand. Over a third of all section 106 agreements took longer than 12 months to finalise. Some 76% of local authorities reported an average timeline exceeding a year, and in over a third of councils it was over 500 days. In 2024-25, 45% of local planning authorities had agreements finalised that had taken over 1,000 days to complete. Dose the Minister agree that in order to unlock some of the housing that is needed, we need a simplified and standardised method for section 106 notices across the country? [Interruption.] He says yes from a sedentary position. I look forward to his affirming that in his comments shortly, but we would support that.

[John Milne]

I very much agree with what the hon. Gentleman is saying about the lack of infrastructure provision and with his previous comments on the failure to prioritise brownfield, but does he recognise that all those errors were inherent in the previous system under the Conservative Government? The problem is that they have not been corrected. They were always there, and that is why MPs across the country have been complaining.

[Paul Holmes]

I disagree with the hon. Gentleman slightly. I remember that in the last Parliament, under the Conservative Government, there absolutely was a commitment from Planning Ministers and Secretaries of State to prioritise brownfield development. That was announced during our time in government by the former Prime Minister but three, and by a number of Ministers in the MHCLG.

[Cameron Thomas]

How many was that?

[Paul Holmes]

Well, I believe the hon. Gentleman will have watched the news. I would be the first to acknowledge that we had quite a few in the last Parliament, but there absolutely was prioritisation of brownfield sites first. We prioritised building houses where they were needed, not where they were not.

What steps do the Government plan to take to protect rural communities feeling the adverse effects of increased housing development? If the Government are serious about building homes and maintaining public confidence in the planning system, they must take cumulative impacts seriously, plan infrastructure properly and ensure that developments work with communities, not against them—something that the Liberal Democrats and my party have been very clear will be removed by the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and the English devolution Bill.

I have been very clear about my concerns regarding the Government’s housing targets and the credibility of the 1.5 million homes ambition, which is now being questioned by a number of experts. If the Government are serious about supporting the house building sector and securing its economic benefits, they must ensure that housing delivery is realistic, properly planned and supported by the necessary infrastructure. Crucially, this requires a far greater focus on the cumulative impact of development so that growth is sustainable, communities are supported, and the long-term economic and social benefits of house building are not undermined.

Finally, Mr Twigg, I wish you, the Clerks and staff, the Minister, and even the Liberal Democrats a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.

15:45

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this important debate today, and for introducing it with his customary clarity and civility. It has been a thoughtful and considered debate and I thank all other hon. Members for the contributions they have made. Whether it is simply the result of good fortune or the product of the right hon. Member’s powers of persuasion, this is not the first time we have debated house building in his constituency this year. We also had—as he made reference to—what I hope he will agree was a useful meeting back in March with officers from East Hampshire district council to discuss the challenges his local planning authority faces in setting housing requirements, given the proportion of it covered by the South Downs national park.

In the time I have available to me I intend to address the main points raised by the right hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members, with the usual caveat that I am unable to comment on individual local plans or planning applications, given the role of MHCLG Ministers in the planning system.

I will start with some general comments on housing targets, given that the right hon. Gentleman was perfectly clear in his remarks that they are at the heart of his concerns, but I will also touch on the interesting points made on affordability more generally and on tenure mix. In the NPPF published on 12 December last year, we restored mandatory housing targets that were abolished by the previous Government. We restored them, as our manifesto committed us to doing. It means local authorities must use the standard method as the basis for determining housing requirements in their local plans.

However, we have almost always made it clear that a mandatory method is insufficient if the method itself is not adequate to meet housing need. That is why the NPPF, published last year, introduced a new standard method for assessing housing need that is aligned to our stretching plan for change target of building 1.5 million new safe and decent homes in England by the end of this Parliament. I gently say to the shadow Minister: if he calls that number unrealistic, in his own manifesto, in the bidding war that was pursued during the general election, his own party came out with a 1.6 million number. How a Conservative Government would have set about achieving that is a question for another day.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned affordability with both a capital and a lower case “a”; in its lowercase sense, I say to him that boosting the supply of homes of all tenures has to be at the heart of any strategy to address affordability. There is a wealth of evidence that building more housing for private market sale makes other types of housing more affordable now. Such is the mismatch between housing supply and demand—the result of successive Governments not building enough homes of all tenures, and I include my own party as well as his in that. Tenure obviously still matters. We look primarily to local planning authorities to set the tenure mix in their own local areas, but the draft framework that we published yesterday includes firmer expectations in relation particularly to housing sites over 150 units. We want to see the right type of housing come forward.

[Damian Hinds]

The Minister is very good to give way; I thank him. To be clear, when I was talking about the mix, I was not talking solely or even mainly about the tenure mix, but about the price points and the way that the formula works—he gets the point.

[Matthew Pennycook]

The point was well made and well understood, and I will address it shortly. The new standard method that we introduced relies on a baseline set at a percentage of existing housing stock levels to better reflect housing pressures right across the country. It uses a stronger affordability multiplier to focus additional growth on the places facing the biggest affordability challenge. In general terms, it is a vast improvement on the standard method it replaced, which was based on household projections that were volatile, subject to change every few years and subject to unevidenced and arbitrary adjustments, with the result that local planning authorities found it extremely difficult to plan for housing over their 10 to 15-year plan periods.

I did, in response to the question put to me yesterday by the right hon. Gentleman, give a pithy and straightforward answer. The Government have no intention of withdrawing or modifying the standard method that is now in operation. On the specific point he raised, where affordability ratios fall, the uplift would also fall because it applies over an affordability ratio of 5:1—that is the Office for National Statistics affordability threshold.

I think I understood the right hon. Gentleman’s point about the short-term impact, but the only way to bring the affordability ratio down is to build many more homes of all types, and that is what the target is intended to do. However, it is a complex and technical point and he may wish to write to me on it.

[Damian Hinds]

I will write to the Minister in more detail—but if, in adding to the stock, we raise the median house price, that has an adverse effect on affordability. We get this ironic situation where the more we build, the less affordable it looks.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I do not think that is correct—at least not in the medium to long term. Going back to the point I just made about supply and demand, we have to build sufficient volumes of homes to arrest the steady rise over many years in house prices and start to gently bring them down over time. We are some way away from that, but the affordability uplift should respond over time if we start to build, in a high and sustainable manner, the large number of homes we need.

I will now address the rural-urban balance, which was raised by a number of colleagues. We have had this debate before. We recognise that the targets we have introduced are ambitious and they do mean uplifts in many areas, but such is the severity of the housing crisis in England that all parts of the country, including rural areas, must play their part in providing the volume of homes the country needs.

However, it is not the case that the new formula directs housing growth away from large urban areas. We scrapped the arbitrary 35% urban uplift that the previous Government applied to the 20 largest cities and urban centres—and the core of those centres, as was mentioned. However, across city regions, the new standard method increases targets by 20%. Through it, housing growth is directed to a wider range of urban areas, including smaller cities and urban areas as well as larger city areas.

London was referenced; under the previous Government, housing targets in London were deliberately set at entirely unrealistic levels because that arbitrary 35% standard method was applied not just to the core of our capital city, but to every London borough. We have revised that number down, but London still has a stretching house building target, which we increased in response to feedback to the consultation we received.

In the draft framework yesterday, as the shadow Minister and other hon. Members recognised, we also gave more support for a brownfield-first approach to housing. We welcome responses to the draft framework, through which we now have in-principle support for development within settlements, subject to specified exemptions where there could be unacceptable impacts. We have built on that with the announcement of a default “yes” for development on land within reasonable walking distance around train stations.

Local plans have been mentioned a number of times; in some ways, this gets to the heart of the matter. I would first say to the Liberal Democrat spokesman that, far from undermining the plan-led system, the announcements we made yesterday will strengthen the plan-led system. The clear, rules-based policies in that new draft framework will make it easier for local authorities to come forward under the new system of local plan making and get those plans in place more quickly and effectively.

Why do they need to be in place more quickly and effectively? Because authorities with an up-to-date local plan will typically meet the five-year housing land supply, which is what is required to pass the examination in the first place. Having a local plan in place supports a much more comprehensive approach to considering cumulative impacts of development, so we need those local plans in place across the country. It is not my party’s fault that we do not have universal coverage of local plans. I remember standing for years where the shadow Minister is now, telling Conservative Housing Ministers on this side of the Chamber to take effective action to use the full range of their intervention powers to drive up local plans. We are not there, but this Government are committed to doing that.

The right hon. Member for East Hampshire knows about this, as we have discussed it before: local authorities are able to justify a lower housing requirement than the figure that the standard method sets, on the basis of local constraints on land and delivery, such as natural landscapes, protected habitats and flood-risk areas.

[Cameron Thomas]

I thank the Minister very much for giving way, and I wish him a merry Christmas. Nothing would empower my local authority more than the Government implementing recommendation 89 of the EAC’s report into flood resilience in England. Will his Department do that?

[Matthew Pennycook]

We will respond in due course to that report, in the usual way. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point about flood risk; I am trying to set out that local constraints can be taken into account in the context of local plans. Government provide flexibility in policy for areas that have such local constraints when calculating housing needs and setting targets, and we provided further guidance on the matter alongside the December 2024 NPPF.

East Hampshire district council is availing itself of that flexibility through the use of a locally determined method, as part of its efforts to progress towards submitting its plan for examination. My officials have been actively supporting that process, including by facilitating an advisory visit for the Planning Inspectorate, and I will continue to meet with officers to discuss any further support.

Several hon. Members mentioned the duty to co-operate. Local authorities often face pressure from neighbouring authorities to meet unmet housing needs under the duty. I recently announced that the duty as a legal provision will cease to exist once the new planning system regulations come into force early next year. However, East Hampshire and neighbouring authorities will still be expected to show that they have collaborated across boundaries, including on meeting unmet need, in line with the current and draft NPPF, which set out policies on maintaining effective co-operation.

I understand hon. Members’ long-standing concerns about infrastructure. The Government are aware that there is more to do across Government and with the sector to ensure that the right infrastructure gets built. I draw hon. Members’ attention to the remarks I made in the statement yesterday. The previous NPPF, from December 2024, strengthened the support for infrastructure —particularly essential infrastructure such as health services and schools—and the latest draft, which we published yesterday, consolidates and strengthens that. On top of that, through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which should receive Royal Assent this week, we are streamlining the delivery of nationally critical infrastructure, from rail to roads to reservoirs, across the country.

The shadow Minister asked me about section 106. We want to see a simpler, more transparent and more robust section 106 system. That should include standardised templates. As the NPPF published yesterday shows, we think that, in the first instance, that should be rolled out on medium sites.

To conclude, I thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire once again for giving the House an opportunity to discuss this important range of matters. As in our debate earlier this year, I appreciate that I will not have convinced him of the merits of the Government’s approach to planning reform or the standard method, but I hope that I have provided him and other hon. Members with sufficient reassurance in respect of local plans, infrastructure and other important matters. I too wish all hon. Members, you, Mr Twigg, House staff and officials a merry Christmas. I hope that everyone has a well-deserved break.

15:59

[Damian Hinds]

I thank the Minister for his considered remarks and for his constructive approach to date—the cumulative effect, one might say, of the Minister’s approach. However, I hope that after today he will think further. The Government should issue guidance to local authorities to the effect that, at least in circumstances where they face huge increases in their housing targets in short order, and it is not viable or realistic to suddenly have a five-year land supply available, they should be able to consider the cumulative impact of speculative developments that come along.

The Government should also change the way the target itself is set, so that we get the affordable homes we need, but with the totals rebalanced among local authorities—back towards urban areas and away somewhat from rural ones—so that we end up with reasonable and realistic targets for East Hampshire and areas like it. That would be entirely consistent with—indeed supportive of—what the Government are trying to do on overall housing supply, but it would be a sustainable way of providing the services and infrastructure that people need, fostering community, promoting economic growth, and maintaining the public amenity and productive capacity of our countryside.

I conclude, as others have, in the spirit of the season by wishing you, Mr Twigg, all colleagues from across the House, and House staff a very happy Christmas.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the cumulative impacts of housing development.