Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Andy Carter Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook), and I too remember buying my first home; it was quite a few years ago, but I am sure we have all had that experience of getting the keys for the first time and knowing what it is like to be on the property ladder and faced with a 25-year mortgage.

I want to start by welcoming the intention to update the country’s planning system to deliver the high-quality, sustainable, affordable homes that communities really do need. Getting on to the housing ladder is difficult, and many of the initiatives introduced by this Government —changes to stamp duty, first home schemes, Help to Buy—are designed to make it more accessible, but the reality is that the average house costs almost eight times the average salary. In Warrington, the average price of a home has gone from £140,000 a decade ago to £210,000 today. So we must consider affordability in what we are doing. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said earlier, we all aspire to see our children and grand- children owning their own home, so I am very supportive of the Government’s mission to reverse the fall in home ownership and to give young people an opportunity to benefit from getting on to the property ladder.

The time limit is short, but I want to briefly talk about a couple of issues. First, on getting the 1 million approved homes built in developments that have been agreed but have been land-banked by developers, we need construction to start, particularly as many of these schemes are in areas where there is a significant shortage of new homes. That has to be a priority for Government, and if developers do not move forward within a time limit, they should not expect future permissions to be granted.

Secondly, I have looked carefully at the way councils base their housing needs, and it really is important that the Government are as certain as they can be on economic needs assessments. I am sorry to be technical here, but are we using the right data to project into the future? Covid has shown how behavioural needs and habits change in a very short space of time, and some of the projections will be based on population forecasts from 2014. Given that local plans will count for a further 20 years, anything we can do to update population forecasts should be considered; we should be using the latest census data from 2021.

During the local plan-making process, we also need a clear focus on prioritising brownfield and regeneration sites. In Warrington, our town centre is in a perilous state. Rethinking planning gives us the opportunity to redefine this space close to jobs and transport links, but where the local council has an opportunity to redesignate green belt—we know that this is something developers will push for—we need to ensure, in the plan-making process, that developers are challenged by planning inspectors to ensure that regeneration and brownfield sites are a priority.

Finally, I really want us to look very carefully at the way that we reform leasehold. There are so many in the leasehold sector who have been affected by long-term leasehold decisions, and this is something that the Government can do much more on.