Rural Housing Targets

Andrew George Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds]

My right hon. Friend makes an interesting point. In fact, there is a good example of that in my constituency, on a much smaller scale. Those schemes can materially improve amenity: we can make a better-looking housing estate and add facilities, such as a shop, even a pub, a better children’s playground and so on, that can benefit everyone.

Hon. Members will be pleased to hear that I am coming to the end of my speech. I do not want to overstate matters: the South Downs national park authority does build houses. In fact, it builds more houses, or plans for more houses, than other national park authorities. It co-operates and communicates with East Hampshire district council. However, we still end up with this imbalance, which is bad for both the part inside and the part outside the national park. Quite apart from the question of balance, there is also the question of public confidence, democratic accountability and responsiveness —people knowing how the numbers have been derived, rather than the council effectively having to be a number-taker, as it were, because of the decisions of another group.

My primary ask of the Minister is that he look again at how numbers are distributed between urban areas and the countryside overall. However, I also ask him to look again at how the calculations work in areas such as mine, so that we do not have demand calculated for the entire district with supply going mostly, although not entirely, to one part of it. That could be rectified in different ways. One would be to give district councils total clarity on how they can adjust their method for calculating need without running an excessive risk of the plan being found to be unsound. There is guidance—the Minister may have this in his notes—but here is what it says:

“The standard method should be used to assess housing needs. However in the specific circumstances where an alternative approach could be justified, such as those explained at paragraph 014”,

on national parks,

“consideration will be given to whether it provides the basis for a plan that is positively prepared, taking into account the information available on existing levels of housing stock and housing affordability.”

I do not know about you, Ms Jardine, but I am not sure I could explain to somebody else what that means. If we are going to have guidance, fine, but it has to be clear and it has to give confidence to councils and councillors, who, at the end of the day, are managing public money, that they are not running a serious risk of ending up in court proceedings when trying to do the right thing.

This could be done in other ways. It could be done by having the national park explicitly and transparently set a housing target for the entirety of its area, leaving the individual districts to work it out for themselves. That could be done either individually for each district, or just for the park as a whole.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman has not mentioned the rural exceptions policy. He is talking about rural housing, but to achieve the outcome he is describing, surely he should be advancing rural exception schemes. There is massive hope value on the edges of towns and villages if the targets are high, but rural exception schemes can keep the development land price down by ensuring that those developments meet local need.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. In both his incarnations, he has long been a campaigner on these issues. There are many housing and development issues that I would love to talk about, but I am running out of time talking about just these three, so I hope he will forgive me if I stick to them. However, I agree about the potential of the exceptions policy.

I have one further question to the Minister. With devolution and local government reorganisation, how and when will some of the issues change because we are looking at things on different boundaries? I am grateful to him for agreeing to meet me and my district councillors to talk about the national parks issue, but I hope he will fully consider all the points I have raised today.

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[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Jardine. I congratulate the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this important debate. It is interesting to follow the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith). His constituency is a different environment, with a different set of conditions. It is interesting that he presented this as a question of fairness, in the sense that house building is an imposition rather than an opportunity for local communities. I will explain why I say that later.

Planning should fundamentally be about meeting need, not greed, but it is too often driven by greed rather than need. That underlies the wrong dynamic, which is creating a lot of the ill feeling towards the kind of development that the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire and others have described. The Prime Minister has created a false dichotomy by saying that he is backing

“the builders, not the blockers.”

My fear is that it is putting greed before need, but by proxy, if it is handled wrongly.

The fundamental failing of decades of setting housing targets in the ways that successive Governments have is that they are both wrongly conceived and based on the naive delusion that private developers would be willing to collude with the Government in driving down the price of their completed product. That is a naive delusion that, I am afraid, has adherents in all political parties. They have adopted the view for decades that if we build enough, the price will come down and the developers will co-operate with us in doing that. That has simply not happened.

The fundamental problem with setting house building targets is that house building is a means to an end. The end is meeting housing need. The targets could be to reduce housing need and planning applicants would have to demonstrate how their developments would address that need and reduce the need on an annual basis, rather than simply building to their commercial advantage. In places such as Cornwall, they build to meet the requirements of property investors, second home owners and holiday lets. We do not get the kind of developments that are there to meet local housing need. That is why house building targets are a means to an end, not the end. We see them as a proxy for what we are trying to fundamentally achieve. That is why they are both ill conceived and a naive delusion.

Cornwall is one of the best examples of where that policy has fundamentally failed because it has almost trebled in size. Like Buckinghamshire, it is proportionately one of the fastest-growing places in the United Kingdom. It has almost trebled its housing stock in the last 60 years, yet the housing problems of local people have got worse. I am not saying that we should not build houses and therefore will meet need; I am simply saying that setting house building targets has created an environment in which the wrong type of housing has been developed.

I have to declare an interest: during my nine-year sabbatical away from this place, I was a chief executive of a registered provider, a housing association. I therefore worked in the sector and know how the dynamics of the system work. I know how one battles with landowners, who have massive hope value—expecting that they can get 100 times the agricultural land value on the edge of their town and village if they can get away with it. That is just human nature; it would apply to any of us.

Nicholas Ridley, who was the Environment Secretary back in the early ’90s, introduced the rural exceptions policy, which was the first break from a planning policy that was based purely on use rather than the user. The policy meant that if a development met a local housing need in perpetuity, it would be allowed as an exception. The hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) mentioned that the policy needs to be expanded, and indeed it should. In Cornwall, where the policy is well founded, much affordable housing development is delivered through rural exception sites. It is quite a powerful policy.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

It is fascinating to hear my hon. Friend talk about the success of rural exception sites in Cornwall, but elsewhere only 14 of 91 local planning authorities that have a policy of using rural exception sites have actually built houses using the policy. Why does that discrepancy exist?

[Andrew George]

Well—

[Christine Jardine (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind the hon. Member that we have less than two minutes before we have to move on to the Front-Bench spokespeople.

[Andrew George]

I beg your pardon, Ms Jardine—I ran away with myself. As far as my hon. Friend’s question is concerned, a range of reasons make it extremely difficult to deliver on rural exception sites. One of the difficulties, which I have expressed to the Minister, is that the viability thresholds are quite difficult for housing associations to meet, particularly if the thresholds are based on a cost to value ratio. If the value of properties in a particular location is low, we get into the absurd situation in which the development cannot proceed under that formula. That has counterproductive consequences: the bigger the targets, the bigger the hope value on the edges of communities. It sounds counterintuitive, but the best way of meeting housing need in rural areas is to draw the development boundary tightly and not allow development around it, and to have a very strong rural exceptions policy.

We also need to build in the ability to deliver an intermediate market, by which I mean part-sale or discounted-sale homes that are available in perpetuity for all subsequent local occupants who meet a local first-time buyer requirement. We need to control second homes in rural areas, as well as addressing all the other issues relating to affordable housing need.

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[Andrew George]

On greenfield development, whether it be in the green belt or outside it, rural housing developments often take place in green locations. In the light of that, will the Minister ensure that the Government strengthen local authorities’ ability to use the rural exception policy? We would rather pay 10 times agricultural value than 100 times agricultural value, because we cannot deliver affordable homes on land at that price.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I will come on to rural exception sites, but the hon. Gentleman draws attention to an important point. Under the revised NPPF, it will be for local authorities to make these decisions and conduct green-belt reviews to identify the grey-belt land in their areas. The Government will provide guidance and support with the methodology, but ultimately local areas will make these decisions through the reviews they carry out. We have ensured that the sustainability of sites in the green belt is prioritised. No one wants isolated and disconnected development, which is why our policy asks local authorities to pay particular attention to transport connections when considering whether grey belt is sustainably located.

I want to touch briefly on infrastructure. The Government recognise that providing the homes and jobs we need is not sufficient to create sustainable, healthy places. Our communities also need to be supported by an appropriate range of services and facilities, as the right hon. Member for East Hampshire made clear. National planning policy expects local authorities to plan positively for the provision and use of shared spaces, community facilities and other local services to enhance the sustainability of communities and residential environments, taking into account local strategies to improve the health, social and cultural wellbeing of all sections of the community.

The revised NPPF also includes changes intended to ensure that the planning system supports the increased provision and modernisation of key public services infrastructure such as health, blue light, library, adult education, university and criminal justice facilities. Local authorities should use their development plans to address the needs and opportunities for infrastructure. They should identify what infrastructure is required and how it can be funded and brought forward. Contributions from developers play an important role in delivering the infrastructure that mitigates the impacts of new development and supports growth. The Government are committed to strengthening the existing system of developer contributions to ensure that new developments provide appropriate, affordable homes and infrastructure. We will set out further details on that matter in due course.

Before winding up, I want to touch on housing targets and national parks. The right hon. Member for East Hampshire knows I am well aware of the concerns about housing targets in his constituency and the particular challenges of setting those targets for East Hampshire, given the boundary overlaps with the South Downs national park. As part of our package of reforms in December 2024, we set out further guidance for local authorities on that very matter, and we provide flexibility in policy for those areas when calculating housing needs and setting targets.

The right hon. Member knows that this is primarily related to the availability of appropriate data for those areas. Officials in my Department regularly engage with officials from the Office for National Statistics and other stakeholders on a range of matters, including the data and statistics available to make decisions on housing needs. We will continue to do so as we drive forward our planning reforms. Although we expect all areas to contribute towards our housing ambitions, we recognise the unique role of national parks. That is why national policy is clear that within national parks, new housing should be focused on meeting affordable housing requirements and supporting local employment opportunities and key services.

We expect rural exception sites to come forward wherever possible. Policy helps local authorities meet the local housing needs of rural communities, enabling local people, those with a family connection or those with employment connections to live locally and help sustain thriving places. We want to go further in this regard to better support and increase rural affordable housing. We sought views on this issue specifically as part of the NPPF consultation last summer. We are committed to considering further measures to support affordable housing in rural communities as part of the work that is under way to produce a set of national policies for decision making next year.

I thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire once again for giving the House an opportunity to discuss these matters and other hon. Members for taking part. If anyone has particular constituency concerns, I am more than happy to meet them, but I appreciate their putting their views on the record in this debate.