Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Stuart Andrew
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
I am keen to move the debate further north. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) represents the Birmingham metropolitan area, but I want to move us up to Leeds, as we have not been there so far. I take exception to the amendment tabled by the Opposition, which states that
“the Bill will not help most people struggling to buy their own home”.
The problem we face in Leeds is the ineptitude of the Labour-run council in getting on with putting a planning policy in place and allowing homes to be built. There is no doubt that there is demand for housing in our area, but the council is not properly consulting the neighbourhood plans or the people. A six-week consultation is taking place, but most of my constituents have no idea that it is going on. They have no idea how to contribute and, when they do, they find that Labour councillors, in particular, are not interested in taking any notice of what they have to say. That is leading to a failure of the policy that put the power in the hands of local people.
To turn around and say from a politically motivated point of view that this is all the fault of the Government, who want to build on green fields, is, quite frankly, a lie. It is nothing more than that. Yes, the Government want more houses to be built and the Bill empowers that. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, we have managed to get rid of more than 1,000 pages of planning law to simplify these matters. However, we are not telling the councils where to build that property. In fact, we are trying to be more helpful by introducing the brownfield land register.
Leeds City Council has said that it wants to build 66,000 homes. The debate has focused on London, where there is huge demand, but that is not the demand in Leeds. According to the latest data, there is demand for 44,000 properties, of which 39,600 could be built on brownfield land, but that is not the approach that the council has taken. My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) and I have spent hours, days, weeks and months arguing with the council and with inspectors about the actual demands and needs of the city, but because the council is pushing forward and saying that it needs the higher number, it has allowed the developers to say, “We can’t possibly build that on the brownfield land so we’ve got to go out to the greenfield.” That is especially so because the land is distributed equally between eight constituencies, leaving huge swathes of brownfield land in the middle of the city underdeveloped—it will not be touched, so the development moves outwards.
My hon. Friend and I face the ridiculous situation of having to take 12,500 houses in our constituencies. We do not have brownfield land; we are lucky if we have some windfall land. My hon. Friend has worked very hard on that because his constituency is much more affected than mine in this regard. If the council is building patches of 5,000 homes across a third of each part of the constituency, my hon. Friend and I believe that they should be built in one place. Do not give us death by 1,000 cuts by doubling the size of each village in the area with absolutely no infrastructure improvement. Adding 5,000 homes in just one third of my constituency would mean, on average, about 5,000 to 6,000 extra children. Where are they going to go to school? Where is the sewage going to go? Where is the water supply going to go? How is flooding going to be dealt with? None of those issues is being addressed. It is giving the developers the opportunity to get round all the loopholes and all the planning rules and say, “You’re quite right—we are going to build on that field.”
Unfortunately, until Leeds council comes up with a policy that is right, stops trying to blame the Government for building on greenfield land, and says, “We are a Labour party in Leeds who have been given immense powers by this Government, and we will use them responsibly and do something properly”, we will not see the volume of house building that needs to take place to ensure the provision of affordable houses.
Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the brownfield register will enable us to see precisely how many sites are not going to be regenerated? Is not that an absolute failure for the people who live in those communities and have to look out over these derelict sites while seeing the destruction of our valued countryside?
Alec Shelbrooke
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. The council is playing with people’s lives. These are people who have moved into communities and are working damn hard to pay the mortgage and develop the life that they want, but they do not know what is going to happen. Saying that they want to be looking out on to fields and that they have paid for that is an important argument, but we also need to make the other arguments. Where are the children going to go to school? Where is the road capacity to cope with 400 houses here and 400 houses there, with no infrastructure improvements whatsoever? How do people get access to the doctor’s surgery? People have genuine concerns about how they can function in their daily lives.
I urge my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to look at these areas and say, “We’re giving you the power through a register of brownfield land. If you’re not going to develop that land, we want to know why. We want to know why you’ve decided that all this land in the centre of Leeds is going to be left derelict and you’re going to build on virgin land outside, whether it be green belt or greenfield.”