New Housing Supply

Debate between Andrew Western and Peter Bottomley

Monday 5th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Western (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on securing this important debate and on setting out many of the arguments that I hope to advance in my contribution.

The statistics speak for themselves: more people living with parents for longer; more people private renting, unable to get on the housing ladder; lower rates of home ownership; and adults aged between 35 and 45 now three times more likely to be renting than 20 years ago. The system is broken, the symptoms are many, but the root cause is always a lack of housing supply. This is basic supply and demand, and we must take the action needed to address what is a spiralling crisis.

I speak out on this issue because I have been there. I understand it and I know that millions of young people are suffering because we are not building enough homes. In short, my lived experience makes me a “yimby”, as the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) called it—yes-in-my-backyard, pro-housing, pro-development and cognisant of the economic potential that house building brings. I want to see us build it now and build it all: social, affordable and unaffordable, even. All can play their part in tackling the housing crisis.

So what must we do to get things moving? Quick wins to deliver more housing supply would include the restoration of mandatory housing targets to at least the 300,000 previously committed to by the Government and ideally more; but beyond overarching targets, we must stand by the requirement for councils to show a five-year supply of land, and ensure that local plans are still required to be evidence-based and open to challenge from a planning inspector. Failure to do so allows local authorities throughout the country to under-provide consistently if they wish to do so. That is a scandal, and enabling it to happen would be an abdication of the Government’s basic duty to provide a safe and secure home for all.

What of new ideas to improve housing delivery? We should give urgent consideration to the introduction of a “builder’s remedy” in areas where no credible local plan exists. If a local authority is unwilling to play its part in tackling the national housing crisis, central Government must step in and compel it to do so. The builder’s remedy is not new; it has been around in the United States since the early 1980s, when the California State Legislature passed the Housing Accountability Act 1982. Such a measure in the UK would ensure that local authorities agreed to a compliant housing element in their local plan documents. If they did not do so, their development controls would be restricted, and development would be not just centrally determined, but determined under far less stringent requirements.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

There may be something in what the hon. Gentleman is saying. However, following a planning appeal in Goring, in my constituency, the inspector said that even if every bit of grass in the whole town were built on, the council would still not be able to meet the Government’s theoretical target—and that would mean no green gaps at all between habitations. Would the hon. Gentleman allow exceptions to his general proposal?