Planning and Housing Supply

Debate between Annette Brooke and Martin Horwood

Thursday 24th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

I apologise to you, Mr Havard, and to my neighbour, the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson), for missing the opening speech. I congratulate the hon. Members who secured the debate, which is enormously important.

The issue is enormously important politically for both coalition parties, because we both made profound promises in opposition. The Conservative party’s policy document, “Open Source Planning”, states:

“Our emphasis on local control will allow local planning authorities to determine exactly how much development they want, of what kind and where”—

not how much an econometric model tells them they need, or how much demand has to be met, but how much development they want.

The Liberal Democrats produced a document called “Our Natural Heritage”, which states that

“our quality of life is dependant on the quality of our environment. We will not only work to maintain and enhance it but will give people more access to and influence over it.”

One of the ways in which we suggested doing that was a new designation, the local green space designation. I helped to author that policy, and I was proud when it made its way into the coalition agreement, and from there into the “Natural Environment White Paper” and then the national planning policy framework. As the Prime Minister said to the director of the National Trust, I think, it would be a tool that local people could use to protect not vast tracts of countryside, but those local spaces that were not necessarily the most beautiful or the most rich in great crested newts, but the ones valued by communities.

Instinctively, all of us know which those areas are—we can all think of that local area that people have been campaigning to protect, sometimes for decades, as in the case of Leckhampton in my constituency. I thought, “At last, we have a Government committed to localism, which I am proud to be part of and a supporter of”—Conservative colleagues were equally proud—and that the Government were actually going to deliver on such promises, rejecting the very unpopular, top-down regional spatial strategies that seemed to be imposing numbers from above. The regional spatial strategy in the south-west had 35,000 objections—but the situation around my constituency in Cheltenham is every bit as bad now.

In practice, we are facing the loss of vast areas of green fields. The local paper converted the amount into that popular measure of area, football pitches—about 2,000 football pitches of green fields are about to be lost, if the plan being formulated in the joint core strategy goes through. Almost everything in the plan is greenfield sites, and almost all those sites are in the green belt—there is a Kafkaesque process whereby the green belt boundary is redesignated, so that the bits taken out of the green belt can be built on, while claiming that the green belt is not being built on.

Equally badly, another area at Leckhampton had a sustainability assessment and a green belt review, which talked about its value in biodiversity, public access, the enjoyment that it brings, its rural character, and such things—all of which were recognised by inspectors in the past—but again that is included simply because the econometric model dictates a certain number. That number for around Cheltenham is at least 10,000 houses, which is a 20% increase in the size of the town. That is not sustainable.

As the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) rightly said, it is as if the rest of the national planning policy framework, which we celebrated at the time of its second draft, did not really exist. There were elements that discussed balancing economic growth with environmental and social factors, and things such as the local green space designation to protect what people really cared about; among the core planning principles were meant to be respect for the environment and sustainability, and prioritisation of open spaces and, if possible, brownfield over greenfield development. In practice, however, at local level all of that appears to count for absolutely nothing. We are told that the objectively assessed housing need dictated by the econometric model must be observed absolutely—that the developers must get absolutely everything that they are demanding, because otherwise unelected inspectors will declare the whole plan unsound.

There is a nice coalition balance of local councillors in Gloucestershire. In the constituency of my neighbour the hon. Member for Tewkesbury and in Gloucester city, we have Conservative councillors who felt obliged to vote for the thing, while the Liberal Democrats very much enjoyed opposing them. In Cheltenham, it was rather the other way around—many Liberal Democrats and some Conservatives voted for it, while others voted against. The result was that councillors were put between a rock and a hard place. They were told that if they voted things down and did not move on at least to the next stage of consultation, the plan was likely to be declared unsound, it would all fall apart and we would end up with a developers’ free-for-all.

I have to tell the Minister that local people see very little distinction between what is emerging from some local plans and a developers’ free-for-all. Despite all our promises in opposition, despite the national planning policy framework and despite all the grand words in it about balancing environmental and economic factors and respecting open space and sustainability, we are in a position that is every bit as bad as the regional spatial strategies. That is simply not acceptable—

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Martin Horwood]

I suspect that I shall be out of time shortly, so I fear that I had better not.

I think we will end up in a situation that is just as bad as under the regional spatial strategies. I want to go back to my local councillors and constituents to say that the coalition Government have delivered on their promises, but I have to tell the Minister that that is not what is happening now.

Post-2015 Development Agenda

Debate between Annette Brooke and Martin Horwood

Tuesday 23rd October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

I apologise for arriving a few moments late for this debate, Mr Weir. I congratulate the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) on securing this debate, which is extraordinarily timely not just because of the International Development Committee’s inquiry into the issue and the Prime Minister’s appointment as a co-chair of the high-level panel on future development goals after 2015, but because of the coincidence of roles that the Prime Minister is taking on at this time. He will also be chairing the G8 meeting in 2013, and taking on a role in the Open Government Partnership in which the UK should be playing a positive role in increasing transparency, particularly with issues such as transparency through the extractive industries and trying to increase accountability and transparency generally in development. It will also coincide with the historic moment when the coalition Government finally deliver on that 30-year pledge to devote 0.7% of the UK’s national wealth to international development, which gives us, at the very least, a great moral authority in talking about development issues and demonstrates that the UK, even in difficult times, has been willing to take a leadership position on development.

One of the things that the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith has emphasised and that we should talk about in this debate is that the millennium development goals were supposed to be global goals. They were not just aid targets for poorer countries but targets that applied to all countries. We need to make it clear when we consider possible successors, such as sustainable development goals or whatever we want to call them, that they, too, should be global goals, which apply to rich and poor countries, developing nations, emerging economies and established economies. That is one theme that I ask both the International Development Committee and Ministers to pay attention to.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to say that it is worth while having such high-level objectives. Certainly, the objectives that we have set ourselves as a country on climate change have helped to trigger domestic action, and with this Government, we have the acceptance of the targets in the Climate Change Act 2008 and the carbon budgets recommended by the Energy and Climate Change Committee, which have helped to incentivise the Government to deliver on energy reform, the green deal, the green investment bank, smart meter roll-out and emissions performance standards for power generating stations. They have also encouraged us to look at other issues that have been addressed in the sustainable development debate, such as the valuing of natural capital, which the Deputy Prime Minister, when he reported back from the Rio+20 summit, emphasised alongside the sustainable development goals. He said that in valuing natural capital, we were setting an important goal for ourselves as a developed economy in our use of resources and our approach to waste and growth and so on, which is important.

The Government set out an ambitious agenda on valuing natural capital in the natural environment White Paper in 2011. I am sometimes a little unsure of how we have fulfilled the potential set out in that White Paper so far and whether or not the Government now need to do a lot more in the valuing of natural capital and in ensuring that it is paid attention to. In an economic crisis, it is always easy to slip back into the idea that growth is the be-all and end-all of Government policy and that only through economic growth can we improve society. It is also easy to forget what we have been saying, which is that economic growth is not a perfect indicator of the quality of a society or of its success. The sustainable development argument is one that can help us to focus again on some of the slightly deeper questions around growth and sustainability.

I was always told in management training that objectives should be SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound—but at the very least they should be SMT: specific, measureable and time-bound. When such objectives are set at a high level, we should not fall into what has sometimes been the trap at United Nations level of producing lots of slightly woolly, well-meaning, well-crafted and well-negotiated words that are not very specific. The millennium development goals actually achieved those things: they were quite specific; they were time-bound and measurable; as the hon. Gentleman said, they provided a marker on how different states are performing; and they led to some interesting lessons—for instance, as he pointed out, on the impact of conflict and war on achieving development goals. So the high-level panel and the new targets should be focused on delivering goals that are specific, measurable and time-bound.

The Deputy Prime Minister suggested in reporting back from Rio that there should be three important focuses for the sustainable development goals—food, energy and water—and the hon. Gentleman has referred to some of them. Many people also suggest other things that the goals should focus on. Climate change has rightly been referred to. It is crucial; the environment in which we all live and exist as a planet is the one that determines whether development is really possible. Other people have mentioned, for example, disability. Sightsavers has made the specific point to me that disability and poverty are interrelated, both in this country and in developing countries, so disability needs to be considered.

Many NGOs have made the point that human rights and social justice need to be reflected in the successors to the millennium development goals, because it is the poor who are not only most vulnerable to climate change and problems such as rising food prices and the lack of availability of food but who are most vulnerable to economic exploitation, injustice and oppression.

Noting what the hon. Gentleman said about conflict, it is perhaps important that the reduction of conflict and the achievement of peace should be reflected in the new goals. However, that leads to a slight problem and a risk that we end up with a kind of Christmas-tree approach, where everybody has contributed dozens of focused objectives and we try to have 100 priorities. Clearly, there must be some guarding against that. It has been suggested to me that perhaps there should be one overarching sustainable development goal that frames the debate and informs the other development goals. That overarching goal should focus on the poor; it should address sustainability; and it should refer to working within planetary boundaries.

“Planetary boundaries” is a really important concept that goes to the heart of what sustainability really means. Earlier today, I had a discussion with someone who I recommend to Ministers as a source of very sound and well-researched advice: Professor Melissa Leach of the STEPS—Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability—centre at the Institute of Development Studies in the university of Sussex. She told me that she did not like talking about environmental limits, because “limits” implied something that we could not go beyond, and that she preferred the term “zones of ecological stress”. I suggested that, for a politician, that phrase was not going to roll off the tongue terribly easily, but we agreed on the concept of planetary boundaries.

The idea of planetary boundaries is that in looking at development—this relates to economic growth as well—we have to be aware that not only with climate change but with, for example, biodiversity, water resource and other material and mineral resources, we have to work within the planet’s available resources and that, as we start to move over certain thresholds in all these areas, we enter, as she called them, “zones of stress” in which it is possible to advance development but it becomes more stressful and more difficult, and there is more tension and more conflict.

That idea of working within the planet’s resources—of observing planetary boundaries—is a very important concept for what could be an overarching sustainable development goal. However, it is very important that underneath that overarching goal we do not lose the detail and fail to address some of the issues that I have mentioned, such as food, energy, water, climate change, disability, human rights and so on.

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

In that list of the underlying tools and objectives, would my hon. Friend include financial inclusion? Well-regulated savings and insurance products, for example, are very important in triggering developments to achieve other goals.

[Martin Horwood]

I might have to think about that suggestion. I appreciate what my hon. Friend is saying and she makes a very important point, but there is a slight risk involved in considering financial inclusion. For people who are living on less than a dollar a day, the idea of savings products may be a little bit unrealistic. In framing global goals, we want to ensure that they are applicable to populations across the world.

Professor Leach talked to me about the three Ds: direction, diversity and distribution. “Direction” was the clear path that the sustainable development goals had to take. “Distribution” was looking at who gains, who loses and the social justice element of the development goals. “Diversity” was a really interesting one, in that it encompassed the idea that different countries might approach the development goals in different ways. Perhaps that is where my hon. Friend’s suggestion about financial inclusion might be brought into play. In looking at sustainability in terms of rich and developed countries, what she is saying is very important, but for some other countries the idea of financial inclusion might be a later step in the process. I recommend the three Ds to Ministers.

There are a few other points that I want to make about what form the new sustainable development goals should take. First, they certainly should be global; they should quite clearly apply to richer countries and more developed economies, as well as to the lowest-income countries.

Secondly, the goals should be steering the world to look at development within “planetary boundaries”—we might use that term. How can I put this idea in terms that might appeal to my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Conservative side of the coalition? If we look at it as a business, we are talking about operating the world as a business within a safe operating environment that does not take us into high-risk areas. So this is about observing the limits of climate change, biodiversity and resource use.

Thirdly, the goals must be ambitious. The millennium development goals were ambitious. The fact that, as a planet, we achieved some of them but failed to achieve many of them has been a useful tool in identifying where we had problems and in focusing on those countries that had the greatest problems. The sustainable development goals must not be woolly; they must be as ambitious and specific as the millennium development goals.

Fourthly, the goals could follow a formula that has been used in the climate change process of the United Nations framework convention on climate change: the idea of common but differentiated responsibilities, whereby because countries will respond in wildly different ways to the challenge of new development goals, different goals may apply with different degrees of rigour to different countries. For instance, for a country such as the UK, the goals may not be so much about involving women in education or achieving greater access for disabled people, because we would fancy that we would meet such goals already, but they might be about addressing waste, consumption, having too great a focus on relentless economic growth, inefficiency in using our resources and in overstepping planetary boundaries in the way that we handle our economy.

In that respect, I commend to Ministers a policy that unfortunately did not make it into the coalition agreement but that the Liberal Democrats adopted in opposition. Alongside a climate change Act, we wanted to have a waste and resource efficiency Act that took the same kind of target-setting and framework approach to the use of natural resources and natural capital. That would fit very neatly with the framework set out by the White Paper on the natural environment in 2011, and I still commend the policy to Ministers. I think we are talking about “coalition 2.0” or something, so perhaps it is a policy that we could still adopt in the remaining years of the coalition Government before the next election.

The final point I will make about the future sustainable development goals is that sustainability must be mainstreamed within them. One of the failings of the original millennium development goals, which I think the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith referred to, is that environmental issues were slightly pocketed in the last of the development goals and the inter-relationship between environmental sustainability, poverty, justice and development was not really fully developed in the millennium development goals. We need to see that corrected. That was the message not only of the Rio+20 summit but of the original earth summit in Rio 20 years ago. As I say, it is very important that sustainability is mainstreamed within the agenda that we are discussing.

This is a remarkable opportunity for the UK to provide leadership in this area and a remarkable personal opportunity for the Prime Minister, as co-chair of the high-level UN panel, alongside his responsibilities with the G8 and the Open Government Partnership, while the Government are delivering on the historic pledge to devote 0.7% of our national wealth to international development. I hope that the Government make the most of this opportunity and provide real global leadership on sustainable development.

Regional Spatial Strategies

Debate between Annette Brooke and Martin Horwood

Wednesday 30th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

I am extremely grateful to you, Mr Benton, and to colleagues for allowing me a few minutes to speak. I am enormously proud to support a Government who are abolishing the regional spatial strategies. It brings me great pride even to say those words after six years of battling against these things, so I congratulate the Minister. I also congratulate, in the case of Cheltenham, the Leckhampton Green land action group, the Save The Countryside campaign, particularly Kit Braunholtz, Alice Ross, Helen Wells, Gerry Potter and Councillors Klara Sudbury, Steve Jordan and John Webster, and thousands of others throughout Cheltenham, Gloucestershire and the whole south-west, who succeeded in sufficiently bogging down the emerging south-west regional spatial strategy to the point at which it never emerged at all.

This policy of the last Labour Government may once have been well intentioned in an attempt to control the spiralling rise in house prices, but it ended up being undemocratic and profoundly unsustainable, because it delivered targets that were based not even on an absolute number of houses for local people, but on thousands of houses per year being delivered apparently in perpetuity. Presumably, when we reached the end of these strategies in 2026, we would have had further ones that would have had to maintain that rate of supply. The credit crunch in a sense constrained irresponsible lending and helped to deflate house price inflation, but there are a few issues that I hope the Minister will have time to address.

Rightly, colleagues have pointed out the risk of the Planning Inspectorate undermining some Ministers’ intentions. In fact, there is one judgment relating to—I hesitate to try to pronounce this—Bata field in East Tilbury, delivered in a letter in the name of the Secretary of State on 21 June, that also seems to undermine Ministers’ intentions, although it is in the name of the Secretary of State, because it cites the unacceptability of development on the green belt, except in exceptional circumstances, and then it gives the exceptional circumstances as the demonstrable shortfall in affordable housing completions and the quality of the design. Those do not sound very exceptional to me. There is a risk that, even in the Department itself, there are still people who have not quite grasped the new situation. I hope that the Minister has time to address that.

[Annette Brooke]

I am sure that my hon. Friend will have heard me say this before, but in my constituency, a further 1,700 houses were imposed at the examination in public. They were opposed by every democratically elected person, but I am convinced that, if our Government had not taken the measure that they have taken, that extremely undemocratic decision would have been forced through. That gives the message to the Minister and everyone else that we must all take on the new values of the coalition.

[Martin Horwood]

My hon. Friend is exactly right, and I pay tribute to her tireless campaigning on the regional spatial strategy on behalf of her constituents.

The final issue is the possibility that some areas of market housing will be constrained, and we have traditionally delivered some affordable and even social housing on the back of market housing, so it is very important that the Department addresses the need especially for social housing for rent. Will the Minister examine some of the issues, including the use of income from rent more flexibly by arm’s length management organisations such as Cheltenham Borough Homes, to allow the building and buying of more new council housing for rent? That is one of the things that might help to address some of the possible criticisms of the abolition of regional spatial strategies—I am anticipating somewhat the words of the Labour spokesman, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey)—even though they were based on utterly unsustainable levels of economic growth, not on genuinely identified housing need at all.