Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Let me reflect on that in Committee.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

I am interested in what the Secretary of State has said about the re-emphasis on the environmental protections. Of course, in urban areas, that is often urban green space rather than green belt. I have a case in Haughton Green in my constituency where the council closed Two Trees high school. When it closed the school, it said that there would be housing on the footprint of the school but that the fields around the school, in a heavily urbanised area, would be protected, so there would be a green doughnut. It now says that it has to build on the entire site to meet the Government’s housing targets. With what he just said, does he give hope to the people of Haughton Green that the council can look at Two Trees again?

[Michael Gove]

I cannot comment on a specific planning application for reasons that the hon. Gentleman knows well, but I appreciate the strength of his point and will ask the Minister for Housing to engage with him more closely on both that specific issue and the broader policy points that he raised.

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[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), and I particularly agree with him on the need to strengthen the nature conservation provisions in the planning element of the Bill.

Levelling up has been the mantra of this Government for the last three years—it is a slogan that is emblazoned on everything they do—but many of my constituents feel left out of the levelling-up agenda, because their local public services have been decimated over the past 12 years, their health inequalities have risen, and their sense of civic pride has gone into decline as a consequence. It is jarring therefore to hear this talk of levelling-up from the same Government who have overseen the biggest decline in living standards since the 1950s.

I represent a constituency that straddles two local authorities, Tameside and Stockport, whose settlement funding has declined by 24% and 32% respectively since 2015. In 2020, some 12,900 people across these two boroughs were forced to access food banks, an increase of over 25% on the year before. That is yet another example of charity picking up the slack where Government have so catastrophically failed.

However, I want to give the Government the benefit of the doubt and believe that they do want constituencies such as mine to turn the corner. I want to genuinely support the Government in doing that. I do not want to play party politics. It does not serve my constituents well to be left in the gutter while everybody else is doing well. I want to ensure the people I am sent here to provide a voice for share in the wealth, prosperity and future of this country. But for that to happen, we need the Government to look a bit more closely at some of the measures in the Bill.

I shall give an example. A school in my constituency, Russell Scott Primary School in Denton—a school that I went to—had an extensive refurbishment. Sadly, that was botched by Carillion just six years ago. Today it is a crumbling building. The foundations are shot to pieces; the roof is not safe; the fire safety measures do not meet national planning regulations; and when we have freak weather events—which we often do in Manchester—the school floods and sewage backs up into the classrooms.

We have appealed to the Government to provide money for a rebuild, and that has fallen on deaf ears. If we cannot level up our children’s future—and education is our children’s future—we are letting those kids down. Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council has put in a bid to the Government for emergency funding. I hope the Minister will pass my comments on to the Department for Education because true levelling up is education, it is skills, it is the kids and their future—the future of our country.

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[Stuart Andrew]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. He knows—we have had a number of conversations on this very issue—that these are the things we are looking at. I look forward to bringing them forward as part of the Bill.

I want to touch on the issue of build out. I have heard loud and clear from colleagues, and so has my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, about the issue of developers seeming to take a long time from approval to build houses. These commencement orders and an agreed rate of delivery will, we hope, help us to get such permissions built out much more quickly.

A number of Members—my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) and others—have raised their concerns about the national development management policies. One of the key aims of the Bill is to reduce the administrative burden on local councils so that they can concentrate on delivering high-quality, locally-led plans. That is why, through this Bill, we hope to shift the onus of delivering on national priorities to central Government through introducing a set of national development management policies. These policies will cover the most important national planning issues facing the sector, including net zero, tackling climate change and making sure that we are also dealing with heritage issues and protections of green belt.

To those who are concerned that these provisions will somehow override local plans, I would say that that is not the intention. The intention is to produce swifter, slimmer plans to remove the need for generic issues that apply universally, which will help us to reduce time-consuming duplication, and to ensure that local plans are more locally focused and relevant to the local communities. I hope that, during the passage of this Bill, we will be able to give more assurance on that.

[Andrew Gwynne]

The Minister will know that Stockport, which is one of the two councils that covers my constituency, pulled out of the Greater Manchester spatial framework, largely because even though Manchester and Salford were taking a large chunk of its housing allocation, its councillors were against green belt development.

Stockport is a very tightly constrained borough surrounded by green belt. It is now in the process of developing a local plan, but it will have to meet even higher housing targets. Will the Minister guarantee that if Stockport develops a local plan that meets the needs of Stockport but saves and protects the green belt around Stockport, he will support it?

[Stuart Andrew]

The hon. Member knows that I cannot comment on individual plans. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) would be the first to apply for an urgent question asking me to explain why I prejudged a local plan. What I would say, in general terms, is that it is clear that local authorities can argue the constraints that they may have, and his local authority may be planning to do that; I do not know.

Let me move on, because I am conscious of time. I turn to second homes, because, if I did not, my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), as well as my hon. Friends the Members for St Ives (Derek Thomas) and for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) and others, would be rather angry with me. We have put provisions in the Bill to try to help on that, and I know that she wants us to go further. I have made a commitment to come down to the south-west to hold a series of roundtables and see the issues for myself. We will see what else can be done as we go through the Bill’s passage.