Homes: Existing Communities

Baroness Pinnock Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this debate took a turn that I was not expecting which has made me entirely rethink what I am going say. I ought to declare from the outset my relevant interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a councillor in the north of England. I do not think anyone else in the Room is from the north. We look at things rather differently perhaps from what we have heard so far today.

The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, made a speech turning all our ideas upside down. I understand why people get frustrated with the planning system, and I am not one who says that the planning system is entirely right, does everything as it should and produces the housing and infrastructure that we as a country and as communities want and need. However, a more free market approach to housebuilding—all I have heard is of housebuilding—puts more power into the hands of those who are already powerful: those with land to sell, who are, in our current system, powerful operators; and those who are going to build those homes, who are already powerful operators in the system. It omits the one element in the planning system that gives influence, rather than power, to people in that community and that place to help them think about how they want their place to be.

A free market approach, without giving power and influence to the third element of the equation, is not one I want to be part of. That is because, having been in local government for a long time, I know that developers do not have the best interests of local places in their hearts when they start building. They are interested in acting exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, described: as a free market, building what they want, where they want to build it, without cognisance of the places around them.

There are many examples of developers who have taken liberties with the planning system and have not left the infrastructure as we would like it. In fact, they do not leave infrastructure at all; they do not build it. One of the main reasons you need a planning system is to put a rein around those whose objective is to see housing as a retail offer—or sale—and not as a place that shapes part of our communities.

I am mindful, having been made to think by the noble Lord, that I have not said any of the things that I had written down. One question that comes to mind, though, is: under that system who would build the million homes for social rent that this country and its people desperately need? It would not be as profitable, so who would do it? That is a key question for the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson. How do you then balance housebuilding and all the other interests local people have, such as the environment, infrastructure, public transport and avoiding flooding? How does that fit in? I cannot see it, and that is why we have a planning system. A plan-based system, even though it is not working as well as it should, is one that I hope we stick with.