Homes: Existing Communities

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Grand Committee

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to respond for the Government on this important topic. What an interesting debate it has been. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, for leading on the debate and for the ideas he expressed. I am grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, will take our best wishes back to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill; I hope that things are better for her over the weekend.

Our country is in the midst of a housing crisis after decades of not building enough homes. The impacts of this undersupply of homes can be seen in rising rents and housing costs, placing the dream of home ownership out of reach for too many and increasing homelessness, overcrowding and poverty. We have a crisis of affordability, making it harder for people to live and work where they want to and hampering economic growth across the country.

The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, referred to the thorny issue of hope value. I thank him for his positive response to our targets and share his frustration about the system. In fact, the CMA report on housebuilding set out clearly that the market has not worked for housing. Leaving it to the market just has not worked—but if Next built homes, perhaps, who knows? To address the housing crisis, we need historic levels of housebuilding, but it is vital that the homes we deliver are well designed and contribute to strong and healthy communities where people can work and thrive.

I will respond thematically first then cover the issues that were raised with me. On housebuilding, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn for his comments. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have been clear that delivering 1.5 million homes over the Parliament is stretching. We know that it is a challenge but we make no apology for the scale of our ambition. We need to pull every lever to deliver the homes that this country desperately needs. To do so, we will make more land with planning permission available and reform the market so that it is more competitive and delivers more homes faster.

We will not achieve our aims if we remain reliant on a speculative model of development that fosters slow build-out and poor competition. Next year, we will set out our vision for a reformed, more diverse housebuilding system in a long-term housing strategy. At the heart of our ambition is delivering the biggest boost to social and affordable housebuilding in a generation. That is why we have made a down payment on this through our £500 million investment in the affordable homes programme in order to deliver 5,000 new social and affordable homes, taking its annual budget to more than £3 billion next year.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned the development opportunities in releasing grey-belt land and supporting communities through our planning golden rules. That is how we will unlock some of this development. We are taking the important step of reviewing the post-war green-belt policy to make sure that it better meets the needs of present and future generations. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, may have misunderstood the policy. We have made it completely clear that development must look to brownfield first. I totally agree with him about the density of building but we know that brownfield alone will never be enough to meet our needs, even if we provide the brownfield passports we have been talking about. This is why we are introducing reforms that will make it clear that local authorities otherwise unable to meet their development needs should review their green belt in order to identify opportunities to create affordable, sustainable, green and well-designed developments. In doing so, low-quality brownfield and grey-belt sites in the green belt should be prioritised as opportunities for development before we even look at proper green-belt sites.

I turn to the important topic of housing quality. Noble Lords have made a number of points on this; I will come to them in a moment. It is essential that people’s homes are safe and secure. We will consult early next year on an updated decent homes standard, which will apply to both the private and social rented sectors; this will ensure that safe, secure housing is the standard that residents can expect in both tenures. It will complement our consultations on introducing minimum energy efficiency standards to the rented sectors and will help both to give people warmer homes that are affordable to heat and to tackle damp and mould.

We will also apply Awaab’s law across both rented sectors, setting clear legal expectations about timeframes. This will ensure that all renters in England are empowered to challenge dangerous conditions. Together—this is the point I want to stress—these measures will ensure that homes are safe, secure and hazard free, tackling the blight of some of the poor-quality homes that we have seen.

On communities, which were raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, the Government are committed to the plan-making system. It is the right way to plan for growth, by bringing local authorities and communities together to agree the futures of their areas. That is the important thing about plan-making: this is what it is intended to do. This will ensure that local communities get the houses they need in the right place at the right time, reflecting the principles of sustainable development. Local plans provide the stability and certainty that local people and developers want to see the planning system deliver, which is why it is very important to us that we see universal coverage of ambitious plans as soon as possible. That has not been the case in the past. The Deputy Prime Minister has made it quite clear that, where plans do not appear, she will exercise her powers to make them come through.

The Government recognise that providing homes and jobs alone is not sufficient to create sustainable, healthy places. Our communities also need to be supported by an appropriate range of services and facilities. The proposals in the recent government consultation on changes to the National Planning Policy Framework include changes intended to support the provision of public infrastructure and to create sustainable, healthy communities. They include changes to ensure that the planning system supports the increased provision and modernisation of key public services infrastructure, as well as the availability of a sufficient choice of early years and post-16 education places. Alongside this work, we are committed to strengthening the existing system of developer contributions in order to ensure that new developments provide the necessary affordable homes and infrastructure.

I turn now to some of noble Lords’ comments, and pick up on those by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, on the three principles. I love, in principle, the “love thy neighbour” principle; unfortunately, my long experience of planning—I was a councillor for 27 years—means that I know that the harm that developments can cause is often quite a subjective issue, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, pointed out. The principle is good in principle, but I need to think about how we might employ it in practice.

On the “carrying weight” principle, infrastructure should be available in all developments through Section 106 or the community infrastructure levy. That does not always happen as it should, and we are looking at that system to see whether we can improve it. Land of community value can already be designated in local plans, noticeably where there are national parks and habitat sites, but the point of a local plan is that such areas can be designated locally.

The noble Lord spoke about pre-1947 as though it was a golden era. It certainly was for my town because it was designated in 1946. I do not think that the people then thought it was perfect because when John Silkin came to announce the development of the new town, he was shouted at in the town hall and people put “Silkingrad” up across the railway station sign. I do not think that people were that happy about planning in those days. I also wonder about how the people of Aspley Guise reacted when Milton Keynes was proposed almost on their doorstep. Yet, now, it is one of our most successful new towns. We have to think about how time moves on in that way.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, talked about ensuring that our new towns are built to high standards. We are committed to ensuring that the new towns we are looking at deliver attractive places where people actually want to live. New towns will be governed by a new towns prospectus developed in partnership with the New Towns Taskforce. Developers will be required to meet theoe standards.

The noble Lords, Lord Wolfson and Lord Godson, referred to beauty and design in planning. The Government are committed to taking steps to ensure that we build more homes and places that are high quality, well designed and sustainable. When we did the consultation on this, consultees raised concerns about the additional references to “beauty”, which they viewed as subjective in nature and difficult to define and thought might lead to inconsistencies in decision-making. It is possible to set standards for design quality that reflect the context and character of an area and address layout, nature, heritage, public space, street design, active travel and so on, as outlined in the National Design Guide, all of which, when considered together, can contribute to well-designed places.

Land value was referred to by my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn and the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Wolfson. We have implemented the reforms in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act to provide for the removal of hope value from the assessment of compensation for certain types of compulsory purchase orders where there is justification in the public interest. We will bring forward further reforms in the forthcoming planning and infrastructure Bill.

My noble friend Lord Mendelsohn talked about construction skills. I have commented on this a number of times in the Chamber. We were very grateful for an investment of £140 million from the industry to help us with capacity in the building sector. We will have more trainees and increase capacity. We have invested in increasing the capacity of local planning authorities and in helping the market to thrive by supporting SME developers. We take all those issues on board.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to CPO powers. As I said, they are coming forward. We are committed to making sure that we expand the powers that local authorities have, particularly for new towns, but also to generate the development that they want to see.

I reiterate my thanks to the Committee and to the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, for a particularly interesting and important debate. I have listened very carefully to the points made, and I hope that I have set out the vision with which our Government will deliver the right types of home in the right places and that work with communities rather than against them. This Government will get Britain building again to unlock economic growth and ensure that our country delivers for its people. The reforms discussed today in the National Planning Policy Framework and the further detail will be set out in the long-term housing strategy. We will deliver change for our communities and kick-start the decade of renewal that our country needs.