Planning and Housing Supply

Bob Russell Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate, which has been supported by a large number of concerned Members. In particular, I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) for sponsoring it along with me. There is concern among hon. Members and local planning authorities about apparent confusion in the Government’s planning policies. I requested this debate because I want to consider planning, the countryside and housing projections, as well as related issues, such as the Government’s professed preference for localism, as these matters are all interconnected.

Protecting the countryside was one of my main motivations for entering Parliament in the first place. As I represent the constituency of Tewkesbury, I am more sensitive than most to the need to avoid developing on or near flood risk areas. The terrible 2007 floods in Tewkesbury will never be forgotten by anyone who lived through them. I spend a lot of time trying to attract businesses, visitors and people in general to Tewkesbury, so I believe that a balance can be struck between allowing appropriate development and protecting our green belt, green fields and important open spaces, but I am not sure that we are striking that balance at the moment.

What do I mean by confusion in policy? The Government have said frequently, for example, that their policy is to preserve green-belt land, yet my local planning authorities—my constituency covers three—are telling me that the Government are pressuring them to provide for so many houses in their local plans or joint core strategies that it will inevitably compromise the green belt, green fields and flood risk areas.

In a ministerial statement dated 6 September 2012, the Government said:

“The green belt is an important protection against urban sprawl, providing a ‘green lung’ around towns and cities. The coalition agreement commits the Government to safeguarding green belt and other environmental designations”.

That seems clear enough. However, the same statement goes on to say:

“As has always been the case, councils can review local designations to promote growth. We encourage councils to use the flexibilities set out in the national planning policy framework to tailor the extent of green belt land in their areas to reflect local circumstances.”—[Official Report, 6 September 2012; Vol. 549, c. 33-34WS.]

That is less clear. Indeed, it is confusing, perhaps even contradictory.

On the face of it, reaffirming councils’ right to re-designate the status of their land could be seen as promoting localism. However, the fact is that Government pressure to create high housing numbers is forcing such re-designations, which flies in the face of localism and contradicts the localism policy. The Government’s policies on the green belt and the wider countryside are confusing and contradictory; clearing up that confusion is one of the purposes of this debate. The Government’s insistence on high housing numbers is threatening the green belt, which leads me to question why the Government believe that we need so many houses in the first place. I wish to consider the question of housing projections.

I recognise and claim everyone’s right to a decent place to live. My job immediately before I was elected to Parliament involved working with homeless women in London. My responsibility was to raise money to build a hostel and day centre for them, to enable them to take the first steps back to normality. I learned that in almost all cases, homelessness is caused not by a property shortage but by other factors such as finances, family breakdown, drug or alcohol abuse, unemployment, refugee status or other social factors. It is not that there are not enough houses.

The Government’s own figures seem to confirm that there is no shortage of houses. In an answer to a recent parliamentary question that I tabled, the Government informed me that at the last count, there were 709,426 empty properties in England. Add to that the number of houses with planning permission that are not yet built and the figure for available properties in England comes close to 1 million.

Of course, there are in fact shortages of two kinds of housing: affordable homes, which are scarce in the village where I live, and privately rented properties, partly because it is hard and often undesirable to be a landlord. There are shortages in those two sectors for reasons other than a shortage of houses as such. For example, it is getting on for 2 o’clock, yet any one of us could go out into London or anywhere else and find houses to buy this afternoon. I question the Government’s assertion that so many houses need to be built that local authorities must re-designate green-belt land in order to meet the Government’s arbitrary and undefined housing targets.

Tewkesbury is an example of what I mean. There is no housing shortage in my area. In fact, there is planning permission for houses that have not yet been built, as well as empty properties. In the past 20 years, 7,536 houses have been completed in the borough of Tewkesbury, yet the Cambridge university econometric assessment, which is used by local councils and presumably approved of by the Government, suggests that 10,900 houses will be needed in the borough over the next 20 years—or, to be strictly accurate, over the next 18 years, as two years of the plan period have already passed. Why has Tewkesbury’s housing need for the next 20 years been assessed as 45% higher than for the last 20 years? It needs explaining.

It gets worse. Tewkesbury borough is involved in drawing up a joint core strategy with Cheltenham and Gloucester. The JCS allocation for Tewkesbury borough for the next 20 years is not the 10,900 I refer to, high though that is, but 18,800, which is 150% higher than for the last 20 years. Why? Partly because it is deemed that Cheltenham and Gloucester cannot find land for their housing growth needs, so the houses will be dumped in Tewkesbury borough, potentially causing housing stock in Tewkesbury to increase by 54% over the next 20 years and causing the councils to build on green-belt land and in other undesirable areas.

That raises the question of the duty to co-operate. Gloucestershire has six council areas, not just three, and the duty to co-operate goes beyond county boundaries. Why, then, will the houses that Cheltenham and Gloucester are deemed to need but cannot accommodate end up being built on green-belt land in Tewkesbury? That cannot be fair, and it demonstrates the paucity of the current planning guidance, which says that plans will be considered unsound if the councils concerned have not co-operated. However, it is the councils that are not involved in the plan, as well as those that are, that need to co-operate. How does that work?

I reiterate that if it were not for the Government’s apparent pressure on local authorities to plan for a greater number of houses, the problem would not arise. Such a top-down approach is arbitrary and undefined. I say so because that is basically what the Government indicated to me in reply to a parliamentary question. In a written answer dated 9 July, the Minister told me:

“While there is no standard methodology, councils’ assessments should be demonstrably objective.”—[Official Report, 9 July 2013; Vol. 568, c. 191W.]

What exactly does that mean? If there is no standard methodology for assessing future housing needs, how can Government assessments be right and the local authority’s previous housing figures wrong? That is another question that I want answered today.

That brings us to the issue of localism. In my view, the Government were right to scrap the regional spatial strategies. It was surely wrong for unelected, anonymous people to determine how many houses an area should build and where they should build them. It was therefore with great anticipation that I and many others looked forward to the new housing and planning strategy—only, so far, to be disappointed.

Local plans have always had to be sound, and developers have always had the right to appeal against decisions against them locally; there has also always been a presumption in favour of sustainable development. However, we now seem to have gone beyond that, and to be setting the bar far too high for local planning authorities, and that causes them to contradict another area of Government policy, which is the need to protect the green belt.

As I have said, in my area, Tewkesbury borough will, if the JCS is adopted, have to increase its housing stock by about 54% over the next 20 years. That massive increase will mean that the council has to grant permission for developers to build thousands of houses on land that is currently designated green belt. Such sites have already been identified.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but is it that Tewkesbury borough council is not engaging in a conversation with neighbouring authorities, or do those authorities want to foist some of their development on Tewkesbury, or on its borders?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Thank you, Mr Havard, for calling me to speak. I thank you, the Minister, and the shadow Minister—the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods)—for understanding that I am not able to be here for the wind-ups.

The Minister will have noticed that there are 23 Government Back-Bench MPs here today, and it may well be that, at the end of three hours of debate, he will not have too many supporters. That is because the reality and the rhetoric of the Localism Act 2011 sadly are not the same, and while the intentions were clearly there, the reality is not.

I will be very parochial and talk about my constituency, which is supposed to be the fastest-growing town in the east of England. The Minister will know from questions that I have put to him and to his predecessors that I will be site-specific. I ask him and his officials whether it is appropriate that they will shortly make a determination on a development of 1,600 homes, even though the section 106 agreement fails to deliver the funds for the two schools that are required. It is not me saying that but Essex education authority. It says that there is no money to build the schools. How on earth can approval be given, particularly as the development is contrary to Government policy, which is that brownfield land, where available, should go ahead of greenfield land?

This particular site, which I have dubbed the fields of west Mile End, is adjacent to a former psychiatric hospital site that is on the market and zoned for housing; it has been for several years. The sale could be scuppered at the 11th hour if the development on the farm land goes ahead, because even though Colchester is the fastest-growing town in the east of England, there must come a point when there are too many houses and there is a glut. We already have a glut of flats—the “Prescott” flats. The last Labour Government insisted that the future was flats. We have a glut of empty flats in my town. What we want is family housing.

Do hon. Members remember an advert from a few years ago about a beer that reached the parts that other beers did not reach? Well, we have a local developer called Mersea Homes that is able to reach land that has never been lined up for development before. For example, the fields of west Mile End have always been land without notation—white land. It was never going to be built on, and no developer had a chance there. All of a sudden, under the radar, the land was lined up for development. The ward council did not know about it, or if it did—I am not sure what happened. It is the only part of my constituency with a community council—Myland community council—and it was late in the day when it found out what was going on.

This is a bad development, a bad plan, with 1,600 houses to be served by the longest cul-de-sac in Britain. All the cars will pour on to the already congested highway network around Colchester mainline station. Everybody knows it is wrong, and in a question that I put to the Department for Communities and Local Government, I said that developers and planners should be

“forced to live there for a minimum of five years”.—[Official Report, 4 February 2013; Vol. 558, c. 13W.]

They are creating problems for others to suffer that they will not suffer themselves, because they tend to live in big houses miles away; they do not have to put up with the consequences.

To the east of Colchester—this is why the hon. Members for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) and for St Albans (Mrs Main) are absolutely right—the next-door council, Tendring district council, wants to plonk houses on farm land that, astonishingly, nobody has ever thought should be built on, and on which, in 2010, Mersea Homes secured the best part of 800 acres. Having been lucky twice with farm land that had never been zoned for housing, Mersea Homes must know how to go about securing it. I will leave that hanging there.

Tendring district council has the North sea on one side. Clacton is 15 miles from Colchester, and the council is talking about a development of 3,000 houses adjacent to the borough boundary of Colchester. It will double the urban estates of Greenstead and Longridge Park. It will just be an urban sprawl going eastwards. The local authority—Tendring—should build its houses where its people want them. As for the idea that people living on this huge estate right up on the border of Colchester will look to Clacton—16 miles away, where they pay their council tax—rather than to Colchester, when many of the houses will be in sight of the town hall, that is not what the Localism Act 2011 was about.

What is worrying—I will end on this, Mr Havard—is that it is quite clear that this has all come in under the radar. Elected councillors in Colchester—virtually all of them—have not been engaged in the debate. Secrecy, or at least lack of involvement, is a serious issue here. There should be an inquiry into what the hell is going on.

[Mr Dai Havard (in the Chair)]

Thank you. I have had a missive from Mr Turner. Although special pleading is not allowed, it is his birthday today. I cannot accede to the request that we all sing him “Happy Birthday”, but he indicated to me that he has a pressing engagement, so I call Mr Turner.