Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to join in this debate, which even at this stage is demonstrating that it is extremely well informed and engaging. It promises a lot of substantial discussions in Committee and beyond, and I look forward to listening carefully to those.

For now, time does not permit one to enter into all the arguments, but it seems to me that it is important for us to secure through the ambition and scope of the Bill the resources to enable housing association tenants to meet their aspiration of home ownership, and to generate the resources we need to deploy in the building of additional social housing.

At its heart, however, this is not a limited zero-sum debate about the disposition of existing housing stock. It is about adding to the housing stock and delivering the housing supply we so singularly failed to deliver over the last decade or so, if not longer. As a former Member of Parliament, I saw the housing lists continually lengthening, including right through the period of the last Labour Government, because of the failure to deliver additional housing stock in the places where people needed and wanted to live. Today, I want briefly to illustrate that we have to understand the nature of the past problem we have had and throw everything at it. As the Minister said at the outset, we have to do all we can to help to deliver the additional supply.

In my former constituency, South Cambridgeshire, in the early 2000s—almost 15 years ago—we were debating where we would build a new town. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester talked about building at Ebbsfleet. We had in Northstowe—the name it has been given—a site for a new town of up to 10,000 homes, but the intention was that it be private-sector-led. The debate before 2000 led to the structure plan in 2003, which agreed that this new town would be built and, over the subsequent 15 years, deliver about a third of the additional housing required in South Cambridgeshire. That was not to the exclusion of housing in villages, market towns and the city of Cambridge itself but as a substantial addition to it—6,000 homes by 2016. It is now 2016, and I have to advise your Lordships that of the 6,000 homes that were going to be built, none has been. There is no home occupied.

After 2003, little progress was made on planning for far too long. The planning application began to be presented only in 2005. In 2007, Gordon Brown designated Northstowe the exemplar eco-town. This, unfortunately, delayed any progress because everybody started to talk about the eco standards rather than about actually building houses. By 2008, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said, the market had fallen off a cliff. I think it was probably about a decade ago that he and I were on site discussing it, when he was at the Homes and Communities Agency. Because the project was private-sector-led, there was no progress. It was only in 2012 that the planning application was approved, and only in 2015 was the second phase presented for outline planning permission. It is more than a year ago that Northstowe was described by the then Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, as the place for the first garden city. We still do not have any progress on that either, and it probably got in the way of anybody making any progress. We do not need more initiatives; we need more houses.

Frankly, this example—in which the first home is likely to be built and occupied in early 2017, a decade later than intended—shows that we have to find a better way of delivering major housing projects. Around Cambridge, there are any number of houses being built as urban and village extensions, but we have to be able to balance the housing supply and deliver on starter homes and key worker housing, which we really need around the city. We have to be able to put new settlements in, otherwise we will never get the balance of housing we are looking for.

I welcome the Bill. As is often the case, it must be seen alongside the other expenditure and administrative measures the Government are taking. For Northstowe in particular, and for other new towns that will come along—such as Waterbeach, which has been proposed outside Cambridge—we need the permission in principle. We need that kind of upfront certainty from the point at which the plan is determined. That will reinforce the determination and right of local communities to say, through their local plan, what the structure of their housing and spatial distribution should be. We need to back that up with a government commitment, which we have now received, to direct commissioning and putting the houses in place. For these purposes, that can be linked to the supply of starter homes and key worker housing. It is really important that that happens. If it happens without direct government involvement, there is too great a risk of loss to the community infrastructure levy under the Section 106 planning obligations in the area as a whole, if the starter home discount had to be funded out of that.

There is a test for the Bill. Does it enable the mistakes of the recent past not to be repeated? Does it enable us to deliver more housing more quickly? That will be the test.