English Devolution
Mark Francois Excerpts(4 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Jim McMahon
I know many Labour and Co-operative Members of Parliament have been campaigning hard on the extended community right to buy. That is about giving communities the power to take over those important community assets on their high streets and in their town centres in a meaningful way. The Minister for local growth, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North and Kimberley (Alex Norris), is working hard on a communities White Paper, which will provide far more detail. In the end, it is not just about that community right to buy; it is about a genuine shift where people feel far more control, power and agency in the places where they live.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
Trying to create multiple unitary authorities in Essex will not work, will not have public support, will take the best part of a Parliament to implement and will not save money—in fact, quite the opposite—and there is a risk that local government will grind to a halt in the meantime. As for mayors, in 23 years of canvassing in my constituency, I have never once had a constituent say to me on the doorstep, “I want a mayor of Essex.” Indeed, looking up the road to London, the last thing on earth that we in Essex want is another Sadiq Khan.
Jim McMahon
I will put the right hon. Gentleman down as undecided.
Planning Committees: Reform
Mark Francois Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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Matthew Pennycook
It is true. The Office for Budget Responsibility is projecting that supply will dip below 200,000 homes this year, and the affordable homes programme is on course to deliver between 110,000 and 130,000 affordable homes, not the original 180,000 that were allotted to it. We are taking steps to increase the supply of social and affordable homes, including using the £500 million in additional funding secured for the affordable homes programme in the recent Budget.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
Labour-led Basildon borough council’s new draft plan is at the regulation 18 stage, but it proposes a completely unsustainable 27,000 new properties across the borough, including 4,300 in Wickford, in my constituency, which is completely unsustainable and would involve concreting over whole swathes of our local green belt. As well as reimposing mandatory housing targets, which are an insult to local democracy, why is Labour now trying to neuter local planning committees of democratically elected councillors, taking away the say of local people, when it is desperately difficult to persuade people to vote in local elections as it is?
Matthew Pennycook
Mr Speaker, you will forgive me if I do not comment on the specifics of the local planning question, due to the quasi-judicial nature of the role of the Secretary of State in planning applications. We set out transitional arrangements in the NPPF consultation in July for how local plans at regulation 18 and 19 stage will proceed through the system, to ensure that we get up-to-date local plans through where appropriate and meet housing need in terms of the revised standard method that we have put forward.
We are determined to get these homes built. The right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) says that those levels of housing are unsustainable. It will be for the Planning Inspectorate to decide whether the local plan is sound, but I do not take issue in any way with the ambition that the local authority is showing. We have an acute and entrenched housing crisis in this country. Every week in my advice surgery—I am sure that his is the same—people come to me who are desperately in need of houses. The 1 million homes that the previous Government built in the last Parliament are not enough. We will build 1.5 million homes over the next five years.
Building Homes
Mark Francois Excerpts(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and good luck in your new role.
It is possible to have successful development, but from experience it has to be something done with people and not to people. This policy is the latter. These pernicious top-down targets have the practical effect at ground level of setting one town against another, one village against another and one local community against another; and given the Chancellor’s statement on public spending yesterday, who will pay for the tens of billions of pounds-worth of infrastructure that would be required to make all this work? All experience shows that, on development and house building, the man or woman in Whitehall really does not know best. Why then, is the Secretary of State going back to the old, failed way of doing it, which will not work?
Angela Rayner
I am shocked to have to tell the right hon. Member that the NPPF was an NPPF before we came into government. National targets have always been there; this is not something that I have dreamt up.
The important thing is that our new method is clearly based upon the housing stock, the affordability and the need in an area. That need has created a housing crisis in this country, and that is why the electorate gave the Labour Government such a mandate, because we said that we are going to fix the housing crisis that we have inherited. Again, this is about local plans. I implore the right hon. Member to get with his local authority, to get a local plan, to engage with local people and to listen to those who are waiting desperately—probably thousands in his constituency—for a home that they know will never come.