Mortgage Market

Debate between Andrew Griffith and James Sunderland

Tuesday 13th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

The hon. Lady needs to look at the facts and the numbers. Despite moving in alignment with other international markets—and interest rates have increased over time—interest rates even today for mortgage holders are lower than those reached in October last year. So we are dealing with a macroeconomic international trend, which we are seeing across all western economies. We are moving in alignment with them, but this Government will always prioritise support for households, which is one reason why we have come forward with such significant economic packages in the past two years.

[James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)]

I would love to be able to pass on some good news to my constituents about their households bills. We are seeing wholesale energy costs fall but they are not being translated to the consumer. So how long after inflation falls will we see interest rates come down?

[Andrew Griffith]

My hon. Friend is a diligent champion for his constituents in Bracknell and I am sure it will not be too long before he has good news to talk about on prices that consumers face. We have seen the cost of fuel coming down and as we achieve the Prime Minister’s objective of halving inflation this year, so some of the cost of living pressures that his constituents face will abate. In the meantime, he should know that this Government are on the side of households and we have been willing to support them to the tune of about £3,300 every year. I wish his constituents all the best.

South Downs National Park: 10th Anniversary

Debate between Andrew Griffith and James Sunderland

Tuesday 12th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, but I beg to differ. I do not want to turn this into a debate about taxation, but in my view it would be a simplification—business rates are highly complex, but the value added tax system is well understood and relatively simple in terms of compliance.

Another area of economic activity is the exceptional South Downs national park tourism offering. According to the South Downs National Park Authority, an astonishing 19 million visitors come to the park each year. Perhaps that is not so surprising when we think of the lovely picturesque walks through chalk hills and rural heathlands, the thousands of unique and artisan businesses, and the world-beating places to stay. It generates more than £350 million for the local economy, employing about 5,000 people—although, from my inbox during the pandemic, I believe that is a significant underestimate of what the sector contributes, because it does not lend itself to easy measurement.

If one thing keeps visitors coming back, it is our wonderful and diverse local country pubs. They are at the very heart of what community means to me. Some are literally centuries old, and never in their entire history of plagues and invasions have they had to face the unprecedented challenge of wave after wave of such Government restrictions. As well as making the case for continued support for hospitality businesses, one practical thing that I am doing is to produce a local guide to promote those vital establishments and, after this sad period of absence, to remind us all of their many and varied attractions. The park, too, is helping in the pandemic. Despite a limited budget, the park has established its own £375,000 covid recovery fund, with beneficiaries such as The Hungry Guest bakery, Sussex Lamb and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Pulborough Brooks reserve.

For more than 6,000 years, humankind has embraced the abundant natural resources that the South Downs has to offer. Farming started here in the bronze age and, with more than three quarters of the South Downs farmed and much of the remainder forestry and woodland, the park works closely with farmers, foresters and estates. I am told that there are more sheep than people, so it was with shared relief on behalf of local farmers that we learned of the new trade agreement between the UK and the European Union recently, with its tariff-free access to markets for Sussex lamb producers. I am grateful to my local farmers and the National Farmers Union for the constructive dialogue that we had locally. Our departure from the European Union to me should be a huge opportunity to transform British agriculture, including more domestic market share, raising quality and sustainability, and improving the profitability of food production.

The national park has six farmer-led farm clusters that cover two thirds of the park, with the excellent Arun to Adur cluster in my constituency. They have pioneered the approach of whole estate plans with larger rural businesses. That gives the park authority a solid platform on which to work with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on the creation and delivery of the new environmental land management or ELM scheme, whose success is so vital to us all. I know that the cluster would welcome the opportunity to work with the Minister and his colleagues to develop landscape-scale proposals and for our farmers to be involved in the national pilot to ensure that ELM recognises biodiversity and access, and enhances our cultural heritage.

It is not just farming. In recent years, the fertile soils of the South Downs have witnessed the growth of vineyards, producing a variety of internationally recognised outstanding wines. With soil composition and south-facing slopes similar to those of the Champagne region of France, viticulture in the South Downs is rapidly becoming the heart of British wine country. The many distinguished sparkling wine producers across the South Downs include Nyetimber, Wiston, Hattingley and Bolney. I recently had the chance to see winemaker Dermot Sugrue at work on the Wiston estate and, in what must be one of the only silver linings of that terrible year, he assured me that 2020 will produce one of the finest English vintages yet. Members might also be interested to know that, if their constituents visit and shop here for souvenirs, they can now purchase an English sparkling vintage from Digby Fine English, a producer of world-class English sparkling wine based in Arundel and the House of Commons gift shop official supplier. Buy now, as they say, while stocks last!

But if there is a single thing that excites me—and, I suspect, the Minister—most about the park, it is the contribution that it makes to nature and biodiversity. From the grazing marshes of the floodplains of the Rivers Arun and Adur to the lowland grassland on the slopes of the downs, the national park contains an amazing 660 protected sites of special interest and many internationally important habitats supporting rare and endangered species of plants and animals.

It is possible to spot iconic plant species such as burnt orchid, chaffweed and bulbous foxtail. Our heaths are home to adders, sand lizards and both the field cricket and the wart-biter bush cricket. Almost 40 different types of butterfly can be found within the park’s boundary, including the exceptionally rare Duke of Burgundy, which was recently found to be thriving on the Wiston Estate. The South Downs farmland bird initiative has helped a wide range of threatened bird species found on farmland across the South Downs, including the grey partridge, lapwing, yellowhammer and skylark.

[James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way; he is very generous with his time. I am a one-time resident of a lovely village on the Hampshire side of the South Downs national park. One problem faced by residents there is the appalling traffic and the pollution and noise, especially where traffic goes through ancient villages. Does he agree that Hampshire County Council and the Sussex county councils must do more to mitigate the effects of traffic pollution and noise?

[Andrew Griffith]

I thank my hon. Friend for his timely intervention and for touching on a topic that is of concern to many residents. I not only hold out the prospect of increased police numbers helping to police and make more safe our rural roads, but thank the Government—although I will hold their feet to the fire—for their recent commitment to upgrade the A27 with a new route that will allow significant traffic that currently uses the national park to bypass it and proceed elsewhere.

Nature recovery through partnership working has been at the heart of the work of the South Downs over the last decade, from major projects such as being one of 12 DEFRA-funded nature improvement areas, to smaller nature initiatives in partnership with landowners and local communities. An example of the latter is Steyning Downland, which is run by over 100 volunteers. It carries out local ecology surveys and habitat conservation but also combats local loneliness, something that is close to my heart. It is one of many such schemes across the national park.

As part of the Environment Bill, DEFRA proposes that every part of England should be covered by a local nature recovery strategy. Five pilots are under way, but they are all based on county or unitary authority boundaries. I would like to see the national park given the chance to be at the heart of its own local nature recovery strategy, rather than an exclusively county-based approach. Will the Minister kindly give that her consideration?

On this 10th anniversary, let me conclude by looking ahead to what the park’s second decade might hold. First, I hope that it continues to be well supported by the Minister and her Department, in terms of both financial certainty and the strengthening of certain powers that will allow the park to carry out its tasks further. Secondly, I hope that the recent integration of the Seven Sisters country park, a major change in the national park’s operations, is successful and additive but does not detract from valuable work elsewhere. Thirdly, I hope, perhaps parochially, that we will see the long-awaited transformation of the derelict Shoreham cement works into low-carbon eco homes.

In its first 10 years, the South Downs national park has established itself as an innovative, partnership-based organisation where people and place come together. Tonight, we wish all involved well and express the hope that something that is so important to our nation’s future as our national park survives, thrives and has a second decade that is even more successful in achieving all its many goals.

Dark Skies

Debate between Andrew Griffith and James Sunderland

Monday 14th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

The hon. Member makes an excellent point and anticipates one of the points I hope to get on to.

The first of our recommendations concerns the Minister himself. As has been widely reported, we would like to see a designated Minister for the dark skies with cross-cutting responsibility for this issue. Last week, I and others met the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow). As a DEFRA Minister, she told us about the contributions her Department has made towards assessing the impact of artificial light on wider biodiversity. She also shared with us a fascinating story of her visit to Skomer a few years ago to witness the Manx shearwaters flying at night to find their chicks, making her aware of just how sensitive such creatures are to light pollution, which impacts their flight paths. However, so many of the issues involved lie with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government that if we had to pick one Department, and I believe we do, it is there that we think the designated Minister should sit.

Secondly, the language in the national planning policy framework on avoiding light pollution should be significantly expanded, allowing local planning authorities to impose specific planning conditions related to external lighting, including curfew hours, standards for brightness, colour temperature, as well as the direction and the density of lighting. The most recent NPPF from 2019 makes very little reference to lighting, with paragraph 180(c) being the only reference, which states:

“limit the impact of light pollution from artificial light on local amenity, intrinsically dark landscapes and nature conservation.”

Although a number of local authorities have adopted policies that seek to do that, in practice most development proposals are simply not assessed against such policies. CPRE’s “Shedding Light” survey found that almost two-thirds of local authorities do not have a lighting policy in their local plan and only a third had proactively adopted one to comply with the NPPF.

This need not be the case. The South Downs national park contains approximately 2,800 local authority streetlights, all of which point downwards and minimise the colour temperature. National planning policy on light pollution should require all proposed developments to conduct a dark sky impact assessment and ensure there is no net impact of a scheme on a dark sky location. Much of this could be overseen and enforced by a new statutory commission for the dark skies to develop standards and regulations, and work with local authorities to enforce them. We should also create a national programme of best practice, dark sky hours, in which categories of lighting can be dimmed or turned off completely in consultation with the community, lighting professionals and the police.

[James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)]

My hon. Friend and I share much the same views on dark skies: I am a huge fan. While we need to be careful of safety at night, people walking, pavements and safe passage home, does my good friend agree that turning out the lights could save councils an absolute fortune in money and cost?

[Andrew Griffith]

As ever, my hon. Friend, with his varied experience that he brings to the House, makes an excellent point. Not only can hard-pressed local councils save money that they can redirect to supporting their residents elsewhere, but there is also, surprisingly, no evidence at all that street lighting contributes to greater safety and it has impacts on the environment, as well as some of the other impacts that we talk about. He makes a very good point.

Before we leave the planning process, we cannot ignore the elephant—or perhaps I should say the Ursa Major—in the room: over-development in the south-east. I pick up a point that the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) has already made. I have spoken on these matters many times in this House in my short year here, and I make no apology for doing so again tonight. Right now, my constituents face a veritable clone army of developments, with proposals in Adversane, Barnham, Ford, Kirdford, West Grinstead, Mayfield and every compass point in between.

Consideration of light pollution in the planning system can only be palliative relief while the Minister’s Department consults on taking an algorithm that already lists heavily towards the overcrowded south-east and tilting it still further, rather than levelling up. We are building the wrong types of dwellings in the wrong place. Before the second world war, roughly a fifth of the population lived in the south of England outside London, while twice as many lived in the north and Scotland taken together. Now, equal numbers live in both. We should be building far more in our great urban centres of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and many others—building environmentally friendly supertalls that reach up to the stars, instead of concreting over our last remaining natural places. We should be pursuing commercial to residential conversion on a galactic scale in places where the infrastructure already exists.

Where rural areas such as West Sussex have their own housing needs to fulfil, that should be through a brownfield-first policy, utilising brownfield land registers that are able nationally to accommodate more than 1 million potential homes. How can we teach our children to recycle plastic bags from a supermarket to save the environment, and yet bulldoze by numbers through the ancient fields, hedgerows and woodlands of West Sussex?

Elsewhere, I am proud that this Government are the greenest in our country’s history. We have one of the most ambitious plans for our environment of any leading nation. At the climate ambition summit this weekend, the Prime Minister confirmed that the UK will cut its emissions by 68% by 2030 versus 1990 levels, while our neighbours and friends in the European Union could only manage 55%. I contend that is because conservation has always been at the very heart of conservatism. Our manifesto last December pledged to protect and restore our natural environment by setting up a new independent office for environmental protection. Perhaps protecting our dark skies could be an early and easy win for that organisation.

Finally, we need to give local authorities a more effective method of acting on light nuisance. The current Environmental Protection Act 1990 requires light nuisance be prejudicial to health, which sets an incredibly high threshold for action, and the provision is only focused on the impact of light emission on humans, rather than the environment. It is subjective and difficult to prove. Further to that, relevant sections should be added to the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to prohibit accidental or deliberate disturbance by inappropriate artificial light.

I want to conclude and allow my right hon. Friend the Minister to respond, but first I thank all those who have made this document possible. They are too numerous to mention, but one whose involvement was quite singular was my researcher, and secretary of the all-party group, Chris Cook.

Next week on the winter solstice, the two largest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, will align in the night sky to appear to form a single superstar. This rare event is called a conjunction, and it will be the closest to earth since 1623 and the most observable since 1226, a time when English kings still ruled most of western France. If the night is clear, I shall be lucky enough to observe it from the South Downs. I am told that this particular combination will not be seen again until the spring of the year 2080, which is a humbling reminder of our small place and transient tenure in the universe. I would like to think that we might witness a similar conjunction down here, with a Government who are serious about tackling the damage we are doing to our environment, a White Paper leading to a new national planning policy framework and a growing recognition of the importance of protecting the dark sky.

Housing Developments: West Sussex

Debate between Andrew Griffith and James Sunderland

Monday 7th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend on that. I shall come to the point about the provision in the planning system for different landscapes, including floodplains, which, as we know, West Sussex has in abundance.

The aspiration of owning one’s own home is one that every homeowner, parent and grandparent can support. I was proud last December to stand on a manifesto that pledged to tackle a problem that has been ducked by so many previous Governments, but let us also be clear that that manifesto also said that we would

“guarantee that we will protect and restore our natural environment”.

It also said we would “increase bio-diversity” and devolve

“power to people and places across the UK.”.

I am an optimist, and I believe that, with care, it should be possible to do all those things.

The Government’s recent planning White Paper has many features that I welcome, such as local design statements, more emphasis on brownfield land and faster neighbourhood plans, but I would argue that, perhaps not for the first time this summer, well-meaning ministerial intent has been sabotaged by a “mutant algorithm” cooked up in the wet market of Whitehall. There are seemingly three fundamental flaws in the standard methodology. First, it appears to be entirely blind to geography, which is not a great look for a planning system. If, as in West Sussex, much land is physically incapable of being developed or is protected in law, the algorithm appears to completely ignore this. For example, nearly 50% of Mid Sussex District Council’s land is in the High Weald area of outstanding natural beauty, another 10% is in the South Downs national park and the district is one of the most wooded in the whole south-east. My constituents in Hassocks, Hurstpierpoint and Sayers Common are rightly concerned that if this protected land were excluded without an adjustment to the numbers, the algorithm would force unrealistic amounts of development in what should, in any case, be a precious green corridor linking the ecology of the South Downs and the High Weald.

Also, the algorithm must only work in dry weather, as much of my constituency lies on the floodplains of the Rivers Arun, Adur and Rother, something that even a cursory look at the lacework of blue lines on an Ordnance Survey map would reveal. Anyone relying on the Environment Agency’s narrow definition of flood risk will spend much of their winter bewildered by the waters lapping around their waist, as residents of Pulborough, Fittleworth and Henfield know all too well. Promoters of a 7,000-home development known as Mayfield Market Town clearly fall into that category, as locals know that a large proportion of the proposed site sits under water for a good proportion of the winter. I guess we could build the homes on stilts, like those over-water tropical villas, but that does not quite explain how the residents will get in their cars to drive the many miles that development in such an unsustainable location would require. All that is before we take into account the down-catchment impact of run-off from concreting an area that currently acts as a huge sponge, filling our chalk aquifers and preventing flooding of our coastal towns downstream. My constituents in Hassocks and Barnham have both had the disturbing experience of raw sewage emerging from the drains after planners failed to understand how the water table on a floodplain works.

Secondly, the standard method algorithm is backward looking and self-perpetuating; unlike the famous investment disclaimer, past performance here is treated as entirely a predictor of future success. Districts with high rates of house building in the past are assumed to continue that into perpetuity, so this fatally undermines any opportunity to level up away from the over-heated south-east of England.

[James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)]

Many of my constituents in Bracknell and the Wokingham Borough Council area are very sensitive about unsustainable house building. Having seen the targets that have been put together in the Lichfields table, they are rightly concerned about what lies ahead. Given that both councils that I represent have proudly and boldly delivered against the local plan in recent years, does my hon. Friend think that for the Government to be worthy of their pre-eminence, they need to apply some form of judgment on top of the science?

[Andrew Griffith]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point about the role of judgment in any planning system—particularly one with a Government who are committed to supporting local democracy.

The report from the levelling up taskforce, which was published only today—I congratulate the author on attracting such attention to such an important issue—shows a huge southward shift in the UK population. Before the second world war, roughly a fifth of the population lived in the south of England outside London, while twice as many lived in the north and Scotland, taken together. Now equal numbers live in both. Between 1981 and 2018, the population of London increased by nearly a third, while that of the north-east grew by less than 1%. By piling on even more growth in the south-east, the algorithm is locking the north and midlands into permanent disadvantage, just as Ofqual’s formula dictated that someone from a school that had not done well in the past could never do well in the future. For much of the north and midlands, the algorithm suggests a lower number than the current one, while in the south it significantly increases. Despite the Government’s stated intent, the new formula is levelling down, not levelling up.

Thirdly, the formula uses a simplistic affordability ratio as a false proxy for local need. For an area impacted by central London wages, such as Horsham, the algorithm produces a result that would take the housing stock from 55,000 in 2011 to almost 90,000 over 20 years. That is growth of 62%. However fertile the local population may be, it seems an unlikely outcome at a time when the reproduction rate of the settlement population is barely at replacement levels. Trying to influence affordability through supply has been likened to a person standing on an enormous iceberg and trying to melt it by pouring kettles of hot water over their feet.

The algorithm needs more work. The reason that matters is that high, top-down housing targets induce developers to submit large and unsustainable schemes. Even when they do not get built, they end up blighting residents for years on end. That is the case for Horsham District Council, which, in calling for sites, has encouraged developers to put forward greenfield sites in Adversane and West Grinstead. Both are in the middle of countryside and only accessible by road, and the nearest town of Horsham is a 10-mile drive away. They would create millions of car journeys a year, and there is no capacity in local schools and GP surgeries or local employment opportunities. Ironically, in that particular case, the alternative is the Government themselves, through Homes England, which claims on its website to be able to build 10,000 homes much closer to existing hospitals, schools and shopping facilities in the north of the borough. If that is the case, I say get on with it.

The perfect example of this blight is Mayfield Market Town, which has impacted 27,000 residents across 17 parishes for seven years, dating back to 2013. Residents, through Locals Against Mayfield Building Sprawl and the inter-parish group, have held 73 meetings, and have had to raise and spend £140,000 to fund barristers and commission experts’ reports on a scheme that, to the best of my knowledge, not a single elected person or layer of government in West Sussex has ever supported.

Let me reassure the Minister that in West Sussex we are not nimbys. Over the past three years, Sussex has delivered 6,000 homes per year and has hit 97% of its allocation. I think good development is organic. The historical growth of our small towns and villages can be traced like rings on a tree. Good development supports the village school, the village shop and the village pub. Without exception, adopted local neighbourhood plans have made healthy provision for growth, and have just got on with it. The tiny parish of Albourne committed to 14% growth in a parish of just 260 homes. It approved this at a referendum in September 2016, and by the middle of this year 21 new homes had already been delivered. Every day that we persist in trying to build the wrong homes in the wrong places is another day when we are not building the right homes in the right places.

There is a better way. First, we should adjust the housing numbers formula not just for national parks and areas of natural beauty but for a broader category of floodplains, high-quality agricultural land and vital green corridors for wildlife. As currently constructed, the logical inference is that the more protected land we have in an area, the greater the density of development on the remainder. It is like a closed-loop error in computer code that would see the South Downs national park end up like Central Park, Manhattan, with protected areas hemmed in on every side by high-rise development.

If we are serious about the guarantee to protect and restore our natural environment, we have to build in protection for green corridors for wildlife to move through the landscape and for natural processes to operate effectively. These cannot be cosmetic or artificial—they need to have the original ancient biome intact. One such green corridor is the ribbon of land between Barnham and Eastergate connecting the coastal plain to the national park. Another is between Henfield, Sayers Common, Cowfold and West Grinstead that connects the South Downs with the High Weald. It contains the Knepp estate, where Isabella and Charlie have made such an iconic contribution to rewilding. It hosts one of the largest concentrations of nightingales in the UK, the biggest breeding population of rare purple emperor butterflies, all five indigenous species of owl and, crucially, about 16 breeding turtle doves—the most likely next bird species to face extinction on British soil. This summer, the first white stork chicks born in the UK for hundreds of years hatched there. This ecological gem is at risk from plans to build a 3,500-home new town on nearby greenfield land in West Grinstead, bringing 10,000 new residents, light pollution, and millions of additional car journeys.

I accept that they may currently be somewhat out of favour, but, as the excellent Sussex Wildlife Trust has highlighted to me, there are also extremely rare bat colonies relying on the native woodlands, ancient hedgerows and streams of West Sussex. In fact, West Sussex is home to the UK’s rarest mammal, the greater mouse-eared bat, which is an extinction event happening in real time and on our watch. As its name suggests, it has large, mouse-like ears and a body so large that it has been likened to a rabbit hanging from a wall. In flight, its wings can stretch to nearly half a metre wide. Only a handful of mammal species live longer relative to their body size than humans, and the greater mouse-eared bat is one of the longest-lived of all: it can clock up more than 35 years. Scientists recently discovered that this is probably due to the fact that its telomeres—the string-like material at the end of its chromosomes—do not shorten with age, an insight that could very possibly help humans live longer. Tragically, as the result of its habitat being destroyed, the population of this great creature is believed to be down to a single solitary male.

Secondly, we should exhaust every single opportunity to prioritise building on brownfield land. How can we teach our children to recycle plastic bags from a supermarket and yet let an algorithm, mutant or otherwise, dictate that we bulldoze by numbers through ancient fields, hedgerows, water meadows and woodland while land capable of reuse stands idle? Every local planning authority now has a brownfield register, which in 2019 showed that there was enough suitable brownfield land to build more than 1 million homes. I welcome the Government’s commitment to a “brownfield first” policy, although we should give this teeth by supporting the call from CPRE to require local authorities to write these numbers into their plans as delivered before considering any greenfield sites.

Even in West Sussex, we do not have to look far. In my constituency of Arundel and South Downs, the Shoreham cement works sits on a 44-acre site on the Steyning Road near Upper Beeding. It should be the perfect showcase of an environmentally friendly, multi-use redevelopment of a brownfield site. It could easily provide more than 2,000 quality apartment homes for a mixed community of downsizers and first timers, which is precisely where the gap in the market exists. But it is an eyesore that has been derelict for over 20 years. Despite—or perhaps even because of—many layers of government coming up with their own visions for the site, nothing has happened, and the site is not even being considered within the local plan, while untouched green fields are.

The Government are spending £400 million to support house building on brownfield land, but why is that money only available for mayoral authorities? If it is good policy—and it absolutely is—then let us make those brownfield moneys available for all. In respect of this particular site, I would be grateful if the Minister and his officials would agree to meet me and my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) to see what might be done to move forward.

Thirdly, we should be looking to do more in the centres of our great urban cities, particularly London. Our great capital city is a magnet for talent internally and externally. It is the closest we have got to a city that never sleeps—young, optimistic and diverse; the very epitome of a thriving urban centre. But it is becalmed, challenged by crime, closed roads, closed bridges, congestion and now covid. It is no wonder that the August survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors saw 93% of businesses expecting to reduce their space requirement over the next two years, or that PricewaterhouseCoopers, Linklaters, Schroders, Facebook and many others are all planning for their London-based staff to work from home.

As well as being overdue fresh leadership, London is now badly in need of a new renaissance. Let us take its now hollow core and transform it into the world’s greatest live-work city. London is a city whose centre was razed by the great fire of London and then again by the blitz but in each case was built back better than before. Let us see commercial to residential conversions on a grand scale, building up not out, vertical farming, ubiquitous wireless connectivity, hydrogen river boats shuttling up and down the Thames—and all building on the abundance of existing infrastructure and services that development elsewhere can never tap into, such as world-class teaching hospitals, universities and cultural institutions. I put it to the Minister that this is no time to give up on our urban areas, and London is just one. Exactly the same opportunity exists for Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Cardiff and all our great historic urban centres.

Fourthly, we should acknowledge the special quality of dark skies and use the next draft of the national planning policy framework to preserve and restore the ability of future generations to connect with our universe by being able to see the milky way on a dark night. The most recent British Astronomical Association survey revealed that 61% of people live in areas with severe light pollution, meaning that they can count fewer than 10 stars in the night sky. This is a real opportunity and costs us nothing to achieve.

Fifthly, we must retain confidence in the fairness of the planning system by ensuring that there is one common and equitable set of rules for all. That means not discriminating in land supply between permanent and nomadic residents, which I know causes a great deal of concern to my local councils.

Finally, I make a personal plea to the Minister to give more support to community land trusts, which are one of the best solutions to providing genuinely affordable homes for truly local people. Projects are being pursued at the moment in Arundel, Angmering, Barnham and Eastergate, Pulborough, Slindon and Steyning, each of which I look forward to supporting all the way to their completion.

I ought to conclude and allow my right hon. Friend the Minister to respond. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get this right, and it is vital that we do. This is not about today, but about tomorrow—the future that we want for our children and grandchildren. As I said at the beginning, I am optimistic about the future. I am encouraged that this is a consultation, and I know that the Secretary of State and the Minister have already said that they are open to making changes. Nature has bequeathed us a unique inheritance on to which our forefathers built thriving towns and great enterprising cities while preserving a tapestry of villages, fields and woodlands. We must not preserve it in aspic, but neither must we replace the species-rich ancient countryside and dark skies of West Sussex at risk from overdevelopment.