National Planning Policy Framework

Baroness Pinnock Excerpts

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, for repeating the Statement delivered in the other place yesterday. I draw the attention of the House to my relevant registered interests as a councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham and a vice-president of the Local Government Association. It is a disappointing Statement, not in all of what it proposes to do but in how timid the proposals are and with the wrong focus.

Since 2010 the number of rough sleepers in England has trebled to almost 5,000 last year. The number of households living in temporary accommodation has risen almost continuously since 2010. The latest figures had 79,000 households in temporary accommodation, including 121,000 children, as I have referred to in this House before. Wage-to-mortgage differentials are making owning your own home, as the Statement says, only a dream. The ratio of wages to affordable rents in many parts of England means that in reality these are unaffordable for most people. Some of the measures in the consultation may make a difference but, as with all the Government do in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, it is too little, too slow and the actions never quite meet the rhetoric.

It is regrettable that, despite all of us agreeing that there is a housing crisis and that we need to build more homes, council housing and the contribution that additional council housing could make are not mentioned at all in the Statement. There is one reference to,

“in the social or private sector”,

in the concluding remarks. The solution to the housing crisis will not be found just within the planning process or with developers—affordable homes that in large parts of the country are unaffordable for most people, or increased permitted development rights, which further exclude the local community from the planning process and other measures. We need to allow local authorities to build council homes and housing associations to build more homes on social rents. It will make a real difference to the housing crisis; where people are on benefits it will help reduce the Government’s housing benefit bill; it will help take the heat out of the market; and it will contribute to delivering the improvements to housing that we all want to see in terms of the numbers and the quality of the homes built, with appropriate infrastructure.

Planning departments have taken a huge cut in recent years and the increase in fees that has been allowed is welcome but it is still not enough. Again, I have called many times for full cost recovery on fees. I have suggested that the Government should find one council to pilot full cost recovery but so far they have refused to do that. There are still more than 400,000 approved planning permissions where not even one brick has been laid. I agree very much with the comments of the Local Government Association chair, the noble Lord, Lord Porter of Spalding, who said:

“If we want more houses, we have to build them, not plan them”.


Can the Minister explain why his friend in the other place, the Secretary of State, returned money earmarked for affordable housing to the Treasury? We have a broken housing market, as the Government keep reminding us, so why is the department not making every effort to spend every single penny to build the homes we need? If one area cannot use the money why can it not be used elsewhere? Can the Minister tell the House what work the department has done to see where money could be spent quickly if it is returned from other areas?

Can the Minister give us some idea of the timescale once the consultation has finished? There are a number of consultations going on in the department at the moment—for example, on letting agents’ fees and electrical safety checks—which I have raised regularly. At some point will we get some real, concrete action? It would be helpful if the Minister could tell us.

With regard to achieving sustainable development, I warmly welcome the comments about protecting ancient woodland and veteran trees. That is very good. But can the Minister say a bit more about how the Government propose that we really do achieve sustainable development, particularly with those authorities that are under delivering on housing in their own areas?

The noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, is in her place. I recall our discussions about plan-making last year. Can the Minister comment on plan-making and permitted development—is there a conflict there? If we are increasing permitted development rights in local areas and a local plan has been agreed, is there a conflict? Perhaps the Minister could comment on that.

We all agree that we need to deliver high-quality homes. I am very conscious that Governments of all persuasions made some terrible mistakes in the 1960s and 1970s in the quality of the homes they built. I do not want to see us build homes that are not of good quality and in years to come our successors have to deal with another problem with the quality of housing we have in our communities.

It is not in the Statement but the consultation includes the viability of town centres. We need our communities to be sustainable in terms of infrastructure, and town centres are really important. Can the Minister say a little bit about that? It is not just the planning; issues such as business rates are also important.

Finally, the consultation also talks about sustainable transport. Transport needs to be built into communities as well. I am conscious that we have a number of new towns. Ebbsfleet is one; I have asked a number of questions about that recently. There is some more work to be done to make sure that these new towns succeed.

I will leave my comments there and look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my registered interests as a councillor in the local borough of Kirklees and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The consultation document that the Government have issued details new changes and collates existing measures into an amended NPPF. The details will obviously be the subject of detailed debate at a later date. Today, we have the headlines of the general thrust of government policy on the planning process and housebuilding.

Over the past few days, the media have been full of rhetoric and what I regard as the unedifying spectacle of the Government in full blame-game mode. The blame is on local planning authorities for failing to allocate sufficient land and be efficient in the planning process; the blame is on developers for failing to build allocated sites. But planning for housebuilding depends on three key players: government, the local planning authorities and developers. All need to work together if housebuilding is to achieve the targets rightly set by government. Resorting to a blame game does nothing but create a negative atmosphere.

The Government must consider and be transparent about their role in the planning process. When local authorities develop their strategic plans, it is with clear expectations of housing numbers and site allocations set by government. Once this plan is signed off by councils, it is then inspected for soundness by a government-appointed planning inspector who can, and often does, recommend changes to the plan—recommendations which are difficult to refuse. So despite the rhetoric, it is the Government who are setting the broad requirements and enabling the loss of green-belt land. Can I suggest to the Minister that some clarity of leadership in these matters would be more effective than exhortations and blame? Constructive leadership from government would be more effective in getting the minority of local authorities that have not succeeded in fulfilling government expectations to do so.

Moreover, despite their protestations, evidence shows that developers do land bank, waiting for prices and consumer confidence to rise. Developers are reluctant to build low-cost housing because profit margins are lower—thus not building all the house types in the numbers that are needed. None of this will change without government policy changes, so I welcome the proposal for an investigation into land banking, as long as it leads to actions that restrict it.

If this country is to provide an adequate supply of housing to meet individual needs, more fundamental changes are needed than are being proposed. Perhaps the Minister can respond to some of these issues. First, there is pressure on the south-east because the Government do not have an economic regional policy that draws investment away from the south-east. Developing one would be a significant aid to housing policy. Secondly, that word “affordable” should be abandoned in relation to housing. It is misleading because affordable is what it is not: it is just not as expensive. Thirdly, the National Planning Policy Framework should be amended to enable councils to specify in their strategic plans different housing types on each site allocation: for example—there is some reference to this in the consultation document—housing for older and disabled people. Councils must be encouraged to take responsibility for building homes for social rent. These changes are sadly missing from the consultation. Exhortations to use brownfield sites will fall on deaf ears if the Government fail to provide support for the remediation of sites which are severely contaminated—I speak from bitter experience in my own area.

Finally, perhaps the Minister will be able to explain the Government’s financial commitment to enabling development through providing funding for essential infrastructure. I am not referring to the infrastructure fund. Currently, government policy appears to be to pass on the infrastructure costs of the development that the Government want either to the developers via the community infrastructure levy and Section 106 funding or to local people through a new tax, the infrastructure tariff that I read is part of the proposals. Will the Government change their tune away from the destructive blame game to purposeful leadership so that we can get the housing that this country and its people need in the places that they need it in a sustainable way that does not take away precious green belt land?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I shall respond to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and then turn to that of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. The noble Lord made a very wide-ranging contribution that went well beyond the Statement. I will endeavour to pick up the points, but a lot of his contribution seemed to be on what was not in the Statement, rather than what was, but I shall try to deal with the issues he raised.

First, his mention of rough sleepers enables me to thank local authorities and charitable workers for their magnificent response during the period of very cold weather we have just had. I know that my honourable friend the Minister, Heather Wheeler, has already spent time doing just that, and it is right that we do that. Some lessons have been learned and in that process we have been getting details of people who are rough sleepers, which will help tackle that problem. Let us be clear that it is unacceptable, and the Government have set out clear policies. We now have a Minister who is focused on the issue.

The noble Lord then turned to earnings in relation to affordability. He and others have used that phrase so I will use it, and it does describe the situation. This issue is crucial to the Statement and was dealt with in it, but I have to tell the noble Lord that the steepest earnings to affordability rise was in the Labour years, when it doubled, and the lowest peacetime build-out rates were also in the Labour years. I accept that we need to move forward and look at the issues, which we are addressing. As far as I am concerned, this is not about a blame game, and I will come to that point shortly, if I may, in answering the noble Baroness. This is about building more houses and a mix of houses and stating, once again, that the neighbourhood planning process is very much the right one. We took the Bill in question through to statute recently, and there was a consensus, largely. We are all committed to this neighbourhood approach, and I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Cumberlege, who was very much part of that process. We are still very much committed to it; it is central to what we are doing, but that does not mean that the Government step away and do not have a policy on housing.

The noble Lord asked when some of these consultations will be ending. There are not that many consultations out at the moment. Two are referred to here, one on the NPPF, which ends on 10 May. As the Statement says, we anticipate carrying that forward in the summer. The other one is on developer contributions. That also ends on 10 May, and we would not want to hang about when it reports. A consultation is out on build-out rates and land banking. It is not announced in this Statement as it is already in process. It is an independent review being carried forward by Sir Oliver Letwin. It will report this year, I am sure, but that is a matter for him. We will want to take it forward. The other review, which was widely welcomed, is on the house-buying process, but that is a somewhat different area.

The noble Lord referred to the policy on ancient woodland, and I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Young, who evocatively referred to,

“the cathedrals of the natural world”,—[Official Report, 17/1/17; col. 161.]

and knew the way to progress this area. I am very pleased that it is included. There is, no doubt, still work to be done, but it is important. This is the first time it has been mentioned in planning guidelines, and that is also true of housing for older people, and I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and others who helped on that. Design is also a central feature of this. Those three issues were raised and developed in the House of Lords, and I am very pleased that we have been able to carry them forward.

The noble Lord asked about the viability of town centres. The Prime Minister talked about that very issue and its importance when she launched this policy yesterday. This is something we want to carry forward: releasing property above shops and looking at whether empty shops are viable as homes if they are not viable as shops. They are very often near stations or other transport hubs, so we need to look at that, which is tied in with the issue of the future of our town centres.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said she did not want a blame game and then proceeded to blame the Government—presumably starting from 2015 rather than 2010, when of course the Liberal Democrats were part of the Government. It is not about the blame game; it is about carrying the policy forward and ensuring that everybody does what they can to help with this issue. There are many things we can do, as a Government, as developers and as local authorities. In particular, the noble Baroness did not want us to blame developers. I hope we are not doing that, but she then went on to talk about the scandal of land banking, which sounded to me as if she was prepared to blame them. We want to look at that, and we have it under review. There is a genuine issue—I feel it too—with people who are keeping land and not developing it as they should, but that is part of the ongoing review. That was not announced yesterday, but some time ago, and is being carried forward.

The noble Baroness referred to a lack of regional policy. The policy on housing numbers is very much tied to each separate housing authority—to the price of housing in that area. The areas with the steepest prices are required to take the most action, in very broad terms, so this is integral to what we are doing. She referred to the need for housing for older people, which, as I have said, is in the National Planning Policy Framework for the first time ever. We need to work on it. She referred to the importance of brownfield sites, which I quite agree with. If she wants to address the issue of remediation, which she mentioned, I am very happy to talk to her about it and to look at it, but of course, we require local authorities to come forward with registers of brownfield land and to have a policy of building on brownfield first, before they look at green-belt land. The noble Baroness also talked about how we are looking to transfer some responsibility for delivery on to developers through the community infrastructure levy and Section 106—you bet we are. That exists at the moment, so I hope she is not suggesting we should take it away. We also have a policy of putting money in from the Government, through the housing infrastructure fund.

I do not want to indulge in the blame game. All the main parties in the Chamber have been in government since the war, including the Liberal Democrats, so blame can be fairly apportioned among political parties. This is about looking to the future and how we can deliver more houses in our country.