Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Chris Hinchliff and Gideon Amos

Report stage
Tuesday 10th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gideon Amos]

The amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley and Thame would definitely provide a much stronger justification for a CPO that enabled footpaths and cycle paths to be made. As he said, it would create a more level playing field with the compulsory purchase powers already in use for highways. I certainly agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord). New clause 22 is a very logical amendment, and there is no logical reason why Ministers should reject it, although that has not stopped them so far; I hope that they break the habit of a lifetime.

We are clear in our amendments that communities should lead, and should be in the driving seat, when it comes to development and land. When people see the infrastructure for which they have been calling, it drives more community consent for the homes we need and the communities that we want to build. We need infrastructure for nature as well. Good places to live have gardens, open spaces, parks and meadows, so our new clause 114 would charge development corporations with ensuring those things.

I remind the shadow Minister that development corporations discharged planning powers under Conservative Governments, just as under Labour and coalition Governments. It is not always local authorities that deliver development. It is therefore right to ensure that development corporations discharge their duties as effectively as possible. If and when they build new towns and major developments, as the Government want them to, they must ensure open spaces for nature—spaces that work for people and our environment. Amendment 151 would require them to report regularly on their environmental and climate duties.

The first garden cities were supported by a Liberal Government and built without felling a single tree, as the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) confirmed yesterday. Their successes were emulated, and they are still emulated in the best developments, right up until today. The vision was a radical one of bringing people and the environment, town and country, and nature and humanity closer together. Those pioneers ensured healthier places to live in, an objective that our new clause 6, promoted by the Town and Country Planning Association, would insert in the planning objectives. Today, however, we face the much greater challenge of saving nature, as well as community cohesion and consent, before it is too late.

These amendments may not pass, but make no mistake: there are no greater threats to our way of life than the breakdown of trust, which risks destroying communities, and the breakdown of our environment, which is destroying nature. Those are the challenges that our amendments would tackle head-on, and I humbly urge Members to support them.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

Once more unto the breach. I rise to speak in favour of amendment 68 in my name, and I hope to find as much common ground with Ministers as possible. I fully agree with the Government that we need bold reform of the planning system to tackle the housing crisis, and that is what even stronger reform of CPOs would deliver.

We have substantially more homes per capita than we did 50 years ago, yet over that time, house prices in the UK have risen by 3,878%. The Minister for Housing and Planning was right to argue that housing supply is not a panacea for affordability. There have been 724,000 more net additional dwellings than new households in England since 2015, so the Deputy Prime Minister was right to argue that there is plenty of housing already, but not enough for the people who desperately need it. The fundamental planning reform we need is an end to the developer-led model, which Shelter estimates is on track to deliver just 5,190 social rented homes per year, despite those being the very properties that we need to reduce waiting lists and get families out of temporary accommodation.

The housing crisis is one of inequality. We must move away from reliance on the vested interests of private developers, whose priorities will never align with the public good. Amendment 68 is intended to ensure just that. Half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population. Between 1995 and 2022, land values rose by more than 600% to £7.2 trillion, which amounts to more than 60% of the UK’s net worth. The amendment would build on Government proposals to give councils the land assembly powers necessary to acquire sites to meet local housing need at current use value, and so would do away with speculative hope value prices, which put taxpayers’ money into wealthy landowners’ pockets. That would finally make it affordable for local authorities to deliver the new generation of council homes that is the true solution to this nation’s housing crisis.

If we coupled strengthened compulsory purchase powers with a more strategic approach to site identification and acquisition, we could not only increase the amount of affordable housing built, but achieve genuinely sustainable development, and would no longer be beholden to whatever ill-suited proposals developers chose to bring forward.

The failings of our developer-led planning system are writ large across my constituency. In the 10 years from 2014 to 2024, North Hertfordshire and East Hertfordshire delivered a significant expansion of housing supply—3,973 and 7,948 net additional dwellings respectively. What happened to local authority housing waiting lists over the same period? They rose from 1,612 to 2,449 in North Hertfordshire and from 2,005 to 2,201 in East Hertfordshire. There have been more than enough new homes in my area to clear housing waiting lists, but the affordable homes we need are simply not delivered by a profit-driven model. A further fact stands out: over that decade, during which housing supply and waiting lists grew simultaneously in North and East Hertfordshire, not a single council house was built in either authority.

It is time for a genuine alternative to this farce. I urge the Government to look closely at the amendment, and to push onwards to create a planning system that once again puts people before profit.

New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill

Debate between Chris Hinchliff and Gideon Amos

2nd reading
Friday 17th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Hinchliff]

I wholeheartedly agree.

As I was saying, we could suffer from the potentially profound impacts of competing demands for space for the homes we require, our commitment to protect 30% of our land for nature by 2030, and our fragile food security. Government figures show that with an industry average of 5 acres per megawatt, the proposed ground-mounted solar schemes put forward to date would, if they all went ahead, require a total land area roughly equivalent to Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Newcastle and Leeds combined. Yet at the same time, academic analysis indicates that between suitable existing buildings and new construction, there is potential space for 117 GW of rooftop solar in England by 2050.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it was a shocking dereliction of duty when the previous Government cancelled the zero-carbon home programme, which would have allowed for the generation of around 3,000 MW if every house built since 2015 had had solar panels on it? Does he agree with my residents in Taunton and Wellington, who are aghast and want to see solar panels on the new houses being built in Comeytrowe, Staplegrove and Monkton Heathfield?

[Chris Hinchliff]

I find myself, once again, in wholehearted agreement.

Ensuring that solar panels are installed on the rooftops of new buildings specifically could deliver a generating capacity over six times greater than that of Sizewell C. Clearly, if we start applying a strategic approach beginning with the provisions in the Bill, we can host the vast majority of the solar panels we need on our rooftops. Other nations are already proving that this can be done, with similar regulatory measures currently in place in Germany, China and Japan. Better yet, enacting this legislation would not only accelerate our progress toward meeting our climate targets, reducing the industrialisation of our countryside and protecting rural communities; it also offers the most effective way to ensure that the net zero transition lowers electricity bills for consumers.