Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Oliver Colvile
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I strongly welcome the Bill. It stands comparison with some of the finest examples of progressive Conservative policies on housing in the past 100 years. It is a radical, yet pragmatic Bill, and it draws on the Government’s success in areas such as Help to Buy and the fact that in the past five years we have delivered 260,000 affordable homes, with 140,000 housing completions in the last financial year. I have a great deal of respect for the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). I read very carefully his piece in The Observer yesterday. It was long on complaint, but very short on coherent, costed and cogent alternative policies. He complains about the 32 new planning and housing powers invested in the Secretary of State, but in the same breath he says that we have a housing crisis in terms of supply, and that we need to deal with it. Well, we are dealing with it and needs must. We also have a manifesto commitment to deliver 1 million starter homes by 2020 and the right to buy for housing associations.
I, for one, make no apologies for being very proud that right to buy in the 1980s delivered the biggest transfer of capital to working people of any policy ever in British political history. I am very proud of what we did.
We have the right policy on starter homes. It was a little bit of an afterthought emerging from the ministerial fiat inserted in March this year into the NPPF guidelines, but now it will be on a proper legislative basis. I welcome the new legal duty on local planning authorities to promote the supply of homes and proper monitoring. I welcome, too, the flexibility between the number of homes and areas, because they will not be the same everywhere. We have discrete housing markets, as my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) said. I would perhaps challenge the Minister to consider the fact that there is, unless I am mistaken, no specific reference in the Bill to the insertion of starter homes in the affordable homes criteria. I might be wrong, but he might need to look at that in terms of the NPPF or in Committee. There may be some discrepancy with section 38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, where local planning authorities have to give proper cognisance to their adopted plans.
I support the introduction of a brownfield register. I welcome clauses 102 and 103 and the “permission in principle”, in particular. Only last year, the Campaign to Protect Rural England told us that 975,000 homes could be delivered by virtue of utilising brownfield sites properly. We must, however, have a coherent cross-government policy on this issue. The Public Accounts Committee only very recently looked at the failures of the Department to properly co-ordinate and use its methodology to follow through on the provision of land to the actual building of houses.
Oliver Colvile
Does my hon. Friend recognise that if we are to encourage people to develop brownfield sites, we must ensure that if they have planning permission they should not just sit on it? Should we not consider ensuring that they start paying business rates on land which is potentially to be used for development?
Mr Jackson
I have long been an advocate of a fiscal disincentive from Government to land banking, but the idea of land banking is apparently an urban myth. We need to do more work on that and I hope the Minister will take on board my hon. Friend’s comments.