Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

We must fix our broken housing market not just because it is the right thing to do—we need to build more houses in the right places, at the right price, to the right quality standards, at the right speed, and to the right environmental standards—but because we must keep our promises to future generations and keep our promise to level up. We cannot achieve levelling up without fixing the housing market.

The White Paper and the measures announced in Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech will not in and of themselves fix that entire problem, but I am very heartened. Reading the introduction to the White Paper or speaking to one of our wonderful Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government Front Benchers, one gets the impression that we are on the right track but we will not solve the problem all at once. It is that kind of realism, dosed with the enthusiasm that this Government have for levelling up and for fixing tricky problems, that gives me the confidence that we are heading in the right direction.

The housing market is incredibly broken. We have suffered decades of tinkering. Well-meaning policy interventions from Governments of every type over decades and decades have nicked away at what used to be a market but now operates as some kind of amorphous blob with an incentive coming in one way and an unintended consequence coming out the other.

There are lots of things to like in this Queen’s Speech. I am keen to address the speed at which we can get through the planning process. Seven years to put a local plan together! How can communities stay the same for seven years, when what we want them to do is grow, progress and become better? If we plan on the basis of what we were looking at seven years ago, we will never build the right houses in the right place at the right time.

The digital agenda is close to my heart. We need to make planning smarter, more digital, more accessible. We need to break the stranglehold of big business. Anybody who has ever been through a planning situation knows that the system seems to be set up so that nobody wins—apart from perhaps the developers with the deepest pockets and the longest time to wait. We need to make sure that we break up that monopoly of big players in planning and housing development.

Freeports are part of the infrastructure revolution that we have planned, and a key part of delivering on our promises to level up to stimulate the economy. It is the ambition and the appetite, with that realism, that will take us through, but we need a lot more shooting for the moon. To what we already have, I would add an ambition to reform how we tax property. The stamp duty land tax holiday was a fantastic and very welcome measure to support the market through the pandemic, but we now need to take the opportunity to look in the whole not just at stamp duty, but at business rates and locally raised revenue. Add that to our freeport ideas, and put freeports on steroids—stimulus and tax breaks for inward investment like the special economic zones in some of the highest- growth areas of the world—and we will be cooking.

We need to build the right houses in the right places at the right time, at the right speed and to the right environmental standards, to keep our promises.