Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con) [V]]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Before we approach reform of the planning system in this country, it is vital that we actually get the homes built for which planning applications are still outstanding. The reality is that more than a million homes have planning permission but remain unbuilt. My suggestion to the Secretary of State—I think he knows this—is that after all planning conditions are discharged, developers should be given 18 months to start on site. If they do not, they should lose their planning permission. If they have not built the homes after three years, they should be charged full council tax on every single one of the dwellings that they have failed to build.

I hope that the Secretary of State will consider the planning Bill a work in progress and allow Members across the House to have some input so that we can get it right once and for all. In particular, if he enabled the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee to undertake prelegislative scrutiny, I think that would improve the Bill no end.

I have no objection to planning permission not being needed where a local authority sets out a planning brief for a site and invites developers to come in and build exactly as it has determined, but every other planning application and proposal to build should be subject to local democratic control.

On social housing, we need to be more ambitious. We need to be building between 90,000 and 100,000 units a year. That would mean that there were rents that people could afford, rather than rents being subsidised through housing benefits. We should also transform the position by giving tenants, when they move in, a guaranteed price at which they can exercise the right to buy when their circumstances allow, and then all the receipts should be invested in new social housing. That is an area that we can all improve on.

The Government have been brilliant on Everyone In, and we now need to roll out Housing First right across the country. I hope that we can ensure that we provide the homes that people need so that they are not forced to sleep rough on the streets because of their circumstances.

The Building Safety Bill is clearly welcome. As the Chairman of the Select Committee stated, we did the prelegislative scrutiny and we are still waiting for the Government to respond to that. If they accept all the recommendations made by the Select Committee, that will smooth the process of the Bill, and we will have a Bill that people will be proud of.

The reality is that we need to protect leaseholders from the unscrupulous behaviour of developers. The leasehold reform Bill will take things forward from now on, but we have to combat companies such as Bellway, which sell freeholds from under the noses of leaseholders, without even informing them, to finance companies that then exploit them to no end.

I was disappointed that we did not hear in the Gracious Speech about the repeal of the Vagrancy Act 1824. I reiterate my view that we need to ensure that people who are homeless are assisted but not arrested.

Equally, on health, it is time that we had a tobacco manufacturers 2030 fund, with a levy on producers of tobacco, so that we can invest in encouraging people to give up smoking for the good of their own health. Unfortunately, that was not mentioned. I hope that we will hear a commitment from the Health Secretary tomorrow.