Planning and House Building

Debate between Baroness May of Maidenhead and James Sunderland

Thursday 8th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Theresa May (Maidenhead) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this debate on a very important subject, and on his excellent speech.

We need to build more homes; the Government are absolutely right about that. We need to level up across the country; the Government are right about that, too. But the problem with the algorithm on housing numbers is that it does not guarantee the building of a single extra home and, far from levelling up, it forces more investment into London and the south. That is a mechanistic approach and it is ill-conceived.

We need to reform the planning system. We need to ensure that that planning system sees the right number of homes being built in the right places. But we will not do that by removing local democracy, cutting the number of affordable homes that are built and building over rural areas. Yet that is exactly what these reforms will lead to. We do need, as I said, to build more homes, but we will not do that by forcing local authorities to grant more planning permissions to developers so that they can build more homes to bring the price down, because developers simply will not do it.

The Government need to think again, and they need to understand the impact that their proposals will have throughout the country—an impact that my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight so ably set out. But I want to focus on my constituency. For the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, the housing target will go up by 21%. Given a previous planning inspector’s decision, most of those homes will be in Maidenhead, not in the Windsor part of the constituency, and there is already an implication that green belt needs to be built on. But those numbers are less significant than the increase that is faced in the part of my constituency under Wokingham Borough Council. That council, over the past three years, has seen the delivery of homes over and above its target, but its target of 789 homes per year is now to be more than doubled, to 1,635 homes per year.

[James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour in Berkshire agree that councils such as Wokingham Borough Council and Bracknell Forest Council should be given some credit for delivering against mature local plans, and that very well run councils like them are best placed to understand the local requirement, instead of having national targets imposed on them?

[Mrs May]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend on those points. What seems to be happening is that if councils have delivered in the past—and they deserve to be congratulated on that—they are being forced to deliver even more in the future. Yet, by definition, if you have delivered in the past, you have less land on which to deliver in the future. It just does not seem to make sense, particularly when those who have not delivered are being rewarded by lower target numbers. That is the opinion of parish councils and town councils across the Wokingham area, including those in my constituency—Charvil, Remenham, Ruscombe, St Nicholas Hurst, Sonning, Twyford, Wargrave, and Woodley town council, part of which covers my constituency. They have urged the Government to think again, and to ensure that a realistic and manageable plan is put in place, that is achievable and does not create more problems than it solves.

I say to the Minister that one of the strongest arguments, if not the strongest, against this new housing algorithm—I would have thought that the Government might have abandoned algorithms by now—is that it simply does not deliver a single extra home. We want those homes to be built, but one of the problems that we see at local level is that developers just constantly put in planning permission applications. What we will see is not homes being built, but more planning permissions being built up by those developers.

One of the difficulties is that councils often find that, because of the way the five-year land supply is calculated, they reject planning permission and it is then allowed on appeal because there is not a five-year land supply. Why not count previously granted planning permissions in the five-year land supply, giving developers an incentive to build them out, because otherwise they would not get planning permissions in the future?

What the algorithm does is build up planning permissions; it does not build houses. As Cox Green Parish Council in my constituency has said:

“The real block to delivery is the developers’ appetite to build at a level which will affect house prices and their profit margins.”

It says of the Government’s approach:

“All that this strategy will accomplish is to further undermine public confidence in the planning system.”

My second objection was about the fact that this does not level up, as was very ably set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight. What the new algorithm does with regard to levelling up is fly in the face of the Government’s flagship policy. My point is simple: these proposals do not deliver on Government policies. The Government need to think again and come back to this House with a comprehensive proposal for a proper debate and—dare I say it?—a meaningful vote.