Housing and Planning Bill (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Richard Bacon

Tuesday 1st December 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that Shelter is not a housing association or a housing provider. I am not sure what Shelter is most of the time, but several housing associations gave evidence to our Committee. I am not sure whether he was in attendance to hear their evidence, but when my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South asked whether the measures would result in increased housing provision, they all said that it would. The measures in the Bill will clearly increase supply and will increase the number of affordable homes to buy.

The National Housing Federation told us that the agreement allows housing associations to protect affordable homes, specialist homes and rural homes. Again, that is the question raised by the amendment. Many of the housing associations I have met outside the Committee have said that they will be selling more homes and building more homes as a result of these provisions. Riverside Housing expects a fourfold increase in the number of homes that it will sell as a result of the extension of right to buy. I absolutely support the provisions of the Bill and the clauses that the amendments seek to change.

[Mr Bacon]

I have listened with care to my hon. Friend. Did he hear the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich refer to the OBR? Has he noticed that the OBR does not come out with statistics on how many shoes or chairs it thinks the economy is going to produce? It does not even come out with statistics on how much food is going to be produced and whether the supermarkets will be full or not. I am reliably informed that if someone does not eat, they eventually die, yet somehow we have enough food. Does my hon. Friend think that the central problem may be that the supply does not rise to meet demand, and does the Bill not help with that?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Absolutely. Many of the provisions in the Bill that we have discussed, such as planning in principle for starter homes, will help to solve that problem.

Housing and Planning Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Richard Bacon

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Bacon]

You might want to look at Berlin.

Phil Glanville: Returning to what Mayor Bullock said about scale, it is the scalability of the housing co-ops that exist in London that makes it challenging. We are looking at working with, say, the almshouse movement to build new, affordable homes that are also exempt because people are beneficiaries rather than tenants. Where we can innovate on our land, we will do so, but the scale of the crisis in terms of the thousands of homes that we need to build makes it difficult to use the co-op movement as it is currently constituted.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Q 43 The National Audit Office recently produced a report saying that some local authorities had reduced their budgets for planning and their planning departments by up to 50%. The Bill contains a number of changes that should expedite the planning process. Will this mean that authorities are more likely to staff up their planning departments with the right number of competent people to be able to turn round applications?

Philippa Roe: The absolute key to having the right staffing within our planning departments is to be able to charge a fee that covers the cost of expediting the planning process. At the moment, we cannot charge anything like enough to cover that cost, so basically our council tax payer is subsidising the developers. We are very lucky in Westminster, because of where we are. We have a Westminster Property Association, which funds six planners, to whom its members have access. We can pay appropriate salaries to attract good people, but they are limited to the Westminster Property Association members. I think other local authorities struggle, as we struggle with the rest of our planning applications. As was mentioned earlier, our good people who have Westminster experience are very valuable in the private sector, and they are being hoovered up. We cannot keep them unless we can pay them the appropriate salaries. We really need planning fees to be raised.

Martin Tett: I completely support Councillor Roe on this. There is an almost universal plea from local authorities, whatever their political complexion, that they be allowed to recoup the costs of planning with appropriate planning fees. That would do a great deal to help us to resource up. I also re-echo the point that some of the salaries that the private sector pays good, experienced planners are very high compared with what local government can pay. It is a real challenge.