Housing and Planning Bill (Third sitting)

Chris Philp Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Five colleagues want to ask questions in the 12 minutes remaining, so brevity is of the essence.

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

Q 256 You just raised the issue of local plans, Mr Spiers. Do you welcome the provision in the Bill that effectively requires local authorities to have a local plan in place by 2017, otherwise one will be developed for them? That could avoid exactly the kind of risk you outlined a moment ago.

Shaun Spiers: Yes, we think local authorities should definitely have a local plan. Currently, local authorities are not completing local plans in part because of how the housing numbers are calculated and the fact that local authorities do not feel empowered to resist housing numbers that will have bad environmental consequences. As well as the stick, the Government should provide a carrot by looking again at how housing numbers and objectively assessed need are calculated.

[Chris Philp]

Q 257 Will both witnesses confirm what I think is their view, namely that the emphasis in the Bill on brownfield development, combined with the maintenance of the sanctity of the green belt, should protect rural England from overdevelopment?

Shaun Spiers: If it was as simple as that, it would. We welcome both the emphasis on brownfield and the sanctity, as it were, of the green belt, but we are extremely concerned about the fact that local authorities will be required to commit to implausibly high housing numbers—sometimes double the average housing output over the past 15 years—which will mean they will have to release sites, sometimes in the green belt and sometimes in areas of outstanding national beauty, which will then be developed by developers and the brownfield sites will go to waste. You cannot crack this problem unless you also look at how the housing numbers are calculated. The report we published yesterday is a cracking read, and I commend it to everyone.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

Q 280 To develop the question about home ownership versus rental, would you agree with the analysis that Crisis and Shelter alluded to that home ownership is a fundamentally better form of tenure because it is more secure and the person owning their home gets to participate in house price growth? As Maria Caulfield said, it is often cheaper as a form of occupancy than the private rental sector. Is that part of the reason why you are so keen to promote home ownership?

Brandon Lewis: The short answer is yes. It is important to bear in mind one of the differences between the private rented sector here and in other parts of the world, particularly the US and to an extent Germany. One of the biggest challenges for somebody in this country in the private rented sector is that 91% of the stock is owned by small landlords who own nine properties or less. I think the point was made in the evidence session that nearly 90% of the people who move in the rented sector move home through their own choice.

The biggest risk to a tenant in the private sector is if the landlord decides to sell to an owner-occupier and the type of tenancy at the property changes. In other parts of the world, where there is more institutional investment, multi-family housing and things like that, if a landlord decides to sell their property, they sell it to another private landlord. The tenant’s invoice changes from one company to another, but the tenure of the property does not. That is why people here still look to ownership to being a key part of secure tenure. Extending every opportunity for people to get into ownership is a good thing.

[Chris Philp]

Q 281 Do you agree that extending home ownership is an effective way of fighting poverty?

Brandon Lewis: Certainly. We can go back to when the right to buy scheme was brought in. The Minister who took it through the House was Michael Heseltine, who came to our Department to extol his wisdom—he showed me some of the debate, which I read through. It is interesting that some of the arguments against right to buy back then, in the early 1980s, are almost word for word what we hear from people on the left of politics in the Labour party today. They do not seem to have learned. One thing that people should have learned is that right to buy has been arguably—I would make the case—one of the most powerful forms of social mobility this country has ever seen.

[Chris Philp]

Q 282 Absolutely. To pick up a point that was alluded to by the planning witnesses earlier, they mentioned that planning departments in councils are under-resourced, which is probably broadly true. Do you have any sympathy for proposals that some developers have made that they would be willing to pay much higher planning fees provided that they got a better service in return? For example, if they did not get the service, the enhanced fee might get refunded? I know it is a complicated area and the council might simply swipe the money. Do you have any views on those proposals?

[The Chair]

Quickly.

Brandon Lewis: We need to be very cautious about simply allowing local authorities freedom on planning fees. It could be gamed, to an extent. I am sure that no local authority that any of us know would ever do this, but arguably they could put planning fees so high that it would make it difficult for small developers. Equally, there are planning performance agreements in place, particularly in London where we see very substantial agreements being formed between developers and planning authorities. However, I do think there is a real issue of making sure that local authorities are performing well and that they have very resilient planning teams.

I made the point to the Select Committee just last week, as well as on the Floor of the House last week during Question Time, that planning authorities should be sharing services and resources much better on planning. There is a long way to go with that and much to be found, not just in efficiency but in quality of service, quality of job for planners and excitement around the job. We could see a great improvement there, but we also need to focus on delivering small sites and small planning permissions in the same way we have seen improvements on large site speed of delivery over the past few years.