Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Baroness Pinnock

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 49A would create a register of public land. Quite properly, local authorities are required to compile and keep an up-to-date register of brownfield land within their area. This ensures that the land is reused in an orderly manner for housing development. Most of the land is brought into use without too much difficulty, but occasionally it may be contaminated and require additional and expensive work to bring it up to a suitable state for housing. Given the extreme shortage of suitable land and the enormous pressure for housing in the country, it seems sensible to bring all the spare land in an area into use as quickly as possible. Requiring local authorities to compile and keep up-to-date registers of public land within their boundaries would mean that they would have an accurate picture of where the land is and whether it is being used productively or is just lying fallow. They can then work with the relevant agencies to bring the land into use for housing.

I shall give the example of a Royal Marines base not a million miles away from where I live but in a different local authority area. This base has been in the community for some considerable time, but recently the MoD decided to close it and move the personnel elsewhere. Here is a perfect site for housing. All the infrastructure, including water, sewerage and electricity, is in place, as well as a decent internal road system. There is unlikely to be a gas supply, given its location, but I could be wrong. No doubt some of the infrastructure would need to be updated, but the site would be much more preferable to digging up a greenfield area. That is just one example, but there will be others involving other agencies such as the NHS. Some of this publicly held land will not be as visible as a military base, but it could nevertheless be released for housing. Some of these parcels of land will be small, but could accommodate half a dozen houses, while others will be larger and suitable for 300 to 400 homes. The land supply shortage in some areas is so desperate that it really is time that all possible avenues were explored fully.

Local authorities with housing provision responsibilities are the logical and obvious partners to compile and keep up to date a brownfield register in order to be able to act quickly when redundant land becomes available. I realise that this amendment will not find favour in all quarters, but I look forward to the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Baroness Pinnock]

My Lords, the purpose of Amendment 49B in my name is to draw attention to and, if possible, seek a remedy for the significant delays and difficulties in getting some brownfield sites developed.

Brownfield or previously used land is well defined in the National Planning Policy Framework. The definition includes a wide range of previous uses. Some of these sites pose no particular problems or costs for developers. The sites I am concerned with are those that have suffered considerable contamination as a result of an earlier industrial use in a less-regulated age. Remediation of these sites can be very costly and a big disincentive to developers. There are a great number of brownfield sites. The CPRE research in 2016 estimated that these cover an area sufficient for 1.1 million homes. Those figures may be disputed but that is not my point. My point is that there are demonstrably large areas of previously used land available for development, many of them with current planning permissions, but the sites remain undeveloped.

Using brownfield land has a double benefit. It saves greenfield sites from development and uses existing derelict land in urban areas. This derelict land often attracts problems other than the visual depression it can bring to an area. I am probably one of the few people in this Room who actually lives near some derelict land. I can tell you, it is something we have been trying to resolve for years but cannot because it is heavily contaminated. When the Bill was debated in the other place, Andrew Mitchell MP raised this very issue and hoped that it could be addressed before the Bill’s passage was concluded.

The question is: how can brownfield sites be effectively prioritised? The Royal Town Planning Institute report of last year said:

“Previously-developed brownfield land in built-up areas must continue to play a vital role for a range of purposes including housing. But a ‘brownfield first’ policy will fail to deliver its full potential if there is insufficient available funding for the treatment and assembly of land. New proactive remedial programmes are needed to remove constraints on development and to make places where people want to live which are accessible by sustainable modes of transport”.


Unfortunately, the Government are currently providing disincentives for brownfield development. Not only is there a lack of support for remediation but there are incentives for developers to use greenfield sites, such as the five-year housing supply rule, which enables developers to cherry pick greenfield and green belt sites while ignoring brownfield sites.

The further consequence of the costs of land remediation is that when the land is developed, obviously the costs are greater and so developers are able to argue that any planning gain for the local community is not financially viable. Therefore, affordable housing is lost on those sorts of sites—the very sites where, often, affordable housing is needed. I ask the Minister to respond positively to this plea on behalf of areas across the country, including my own, where land values are lower than in the south-east and where, therefore, the costs of remediation can be prohibitive to development.