Housing and Planning Bill

Lord O'Shaughnessy Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy (Con)]

My Lords, first, I apologise to my noble friend the Minister for missing the first moments of her speech. I thank the House for its generosity in still allowing me to speak. I am deeply grateful for your Lordships’ tolerance of a “newbie”, in the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. It will not happen again. As a newbie, I also congratulate the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, on their excellent maiden speeches. Clearly they will be great assets to the House and are not going to mince their words.

The arrival of the Bill before Parliament is a landmark moment and reflects the welcome importance that the Prime Minister and Chancellor have placed on housing. The Conservative Party manifesto—on the back of which, it is worth remembering, the Government won a majority—pledged:

“Everyone who works hard should be able to own a home of their own”.

What more commendable goal could there be for the Government, when that is the aspiration of almost every family? That has been doubted by some in this debate but we need only to look at the fact that three-quarters of 65 to 74 year-olds own their own home to realise just how much people aspire to this over the course of their life.

This goal is more important than ever because, as many noble Lords have mentioned, we suffer a housing crisis in this country. In the 1980s, housing completions were at 180,000 a year but the rate over the last decade has been only 133,000 on average. At the same time, the population has been growing much more rapidly and household formation suggests that we need at least 250,000 homes a year just to keep up—and we are already lagging terribly behind. The overall floor space of our new-build homes is shrinking, and is now the third lowest in the 28 EU countries. There is a critical intergenerational factor, too, with 700,000 more 20 to 34 year-olds living with their parents. The main reason for this is simple affordability. In 1997, the average London house price was four times average London wages; today it is 11 times. The effect of this has been to reduce home ownership from 71% in 2003 to 63% today. The dream of a property-owning democracy is becoming harder to achieve, especially for the young, and that is not a situation that we can allow to continue.

The Government are rightly taking a twin-track approach to solving this crisis in looking at how, first, to divide the current housing stock more equitably and transfer homes into ownership and, secondly, at how to increase the flow of new homes much more dramatically. It is this latter issue, covered in the planning sections of the Bill, to which I will speak. As the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, and others have said, there are a number of welcome measures that will help increase supply. The clauses relating to self-build can unlock a real housing revolution in this country, moving the market away from one dominated by large housebuilders to one that encourages individuals to meet their own housing needs. This self-build model is very common in Germany, for example, which has also avoided many of the problems in the UK housing market from which we suffer.

Some questions remain that I hope the Minister will address in Committee. Local authorities will be required to hold a register of people who want to do self-build and then grant sufficient planning development permissions on serviced plots of land. Who will pay for those plots? Will local authorities have a duty to advertise the scheme? How quickly will they have to respond to demand? In urban areas, where undeveloped plots are rare, will the Bill enable people to come together to create self-build blocks of flats—the only way this can work in what is ultimately a very urbanised country?

Neighbourhood and local plans have been another successful innovation of the Government, but they clearly still depend on parish or other local bodies to request that an area be designated as such. Again, what about urban areas, where these kinds of hyperlocal fora are less common? What will the Bill do to make sure that local authorities in cities and towns ensure there are suitable organisations that can support the creation of neighbourhood plans across the country?

The proposals for permission in principle offer the opportunity to speed up the planning system. Several noble Lords have said that the planning system is not to blame for the crisis, instead pointing to the number of permissions in so-called land banks, but this is a red herring. Any provider of a good or service needs a supply of raw materials to create their product, and when the process of building a home and getting permission is so slow, it is no wonder that these land banks emerge. If the planning system were quicker, the land banks would be smaller, and that must be our aim. I would like to explore how the combination of the brownfield register and permission in principle could make sure that homes get built more quickly.

Finally, as some noble Lords have pointed out, there is one essential item missing here: the beauty of the built environment. Residents are much more amenable to new homes if they conform to the aesthetic norms of the area, yet this is one policy area on which planning authorities have almost no influence. A trade-off between allowing more freedom to build homes and giving authorities more powers to ensure local design principles are met might be one way to deliver the homes we so desperately need. I warmly welcome the work of my noble friend the Minister on the Bill and look forward to helping her make it even more radical, so that it meets our shared goal of increasing home ownership.