Planning and Housing Supply

Chris White Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who gave a passionate speech. I also start by thanking my hon. Friends the Members for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) and for St Albans (Mrs Main) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) for securing this important debate. As we can see from the speeches that we have heard so far from around the country, this is an issue that affects so many of our constituencies.

During the past two years, Warwick district council has been seeking to create a new local plan that will guide the development of our community for the next 18 years. That is a hugely important document, but it has been mired in controversy and opposition since it was put forward. That highlights some of the problems in the current planning system. The local plan has been controversial because of the number of homes that have been proposed by the council, as well as their concentration and location. First, the scale of the proposed housing development is enormous. The local plan outlines the building, during the next 16 years, of more than 12,000 homes, in addition to the 6,000 that we built between 2001 and 2011. That would increase the number of dwellings in Warwick district by about 20% during the next two decades.

[Mr Graham Brady in the Chair]

The “Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment” compiled by the council has indicated that the total capacity of the district is about 13,000 dwellings between 2014 and 2029, so the proposed local plan would use up 91.8% of the total capacity. Planning is something that we must consider over the long term. Once homes are built, we cannot turn back the clock to change the mistakes that we have made, so we must consider the long-term sustainability of our planning decisions as a whole. How can it be sustainable to build so many new homes and to use up so much capacity?

The concentration of development is also a deep concern and raises questions of fairness. The majority of the new properties will be in the area south of Warwick, Leamington and Whitnash, with 70% of the new homes being placed in that part of the district. That is despite the fact that there has been, and continues to be, a considerable amount of housing development in that part of the district and there are already concerns about the impact that the proposals will have on local infrastructure. I do not believe it is fair that such a concentration is allowed in that part of the district. Residents of those areas are rightly angry about the sacrifices that they are being asked to make in order to allow the development of so many new homes.

I shall take this opportunity to urge Warwick district council, once again, to pause the local plan process and start discussions with local residents so that we can build a consensus on creating a sustainable future for our community. During the process, in the lead-up to the preferred options being outlined by the district council, it was clear that residents did not want to have that number of homes and that they wanted development to take place primarily on brownfield land, rather than greenfield land as is proposed. That will have an impact on the wonderful Warwickshire countryside. Our area has a large percentage of green belt, and I do not believe that we should develop on green-belt land. However, that does not give the local authority an excuse to concentrate developments on non-protected greenfield sites. If our district was 95% green belt rather than 80%, would that mean that all development would be concentrated in the unprotected 5%? Surely it would make sense to adjust the scale and ambitions of the development, rather than to ram through such large developments, which take no account of this situation.

However, the views to which I have referred have not been consistently accepted by the council to date. As a result, public confidence in it has been damaged, and that will undermine future efforts by the council to undertake consultations on new developments or infrastructure. I appreciate that councils have an obligation to ensure that there is enough housing to meet demand in the future, but I also think that we need to ensure that that obligation is met in the right way. I do not believe that Warwick district council has so far acted in the right spirit during this planning process.

I believe that the Government have done the right thing through the Localism Act 2011 to try to ensure that communities have greater control over planning matters. However, we also need to ensure that the process is carried out in the right way, in empathy with such localism, that councils do not ride roughshod over the desires of local people, and that the principles of localism are delivered on the ground.

The best way forward would be for the Government to get each local authority to sign up to a national planning compact that outlines how councils are expected to carry out their consultations on planning matters; the role that local communities should have in co-producing proposals such as the local plan; and best practice in terms of planning processes that have been carried forward and that have brought communities with them. Having such a compact would ensure that each local authority was taking a long, hard look at how it was developing its local plan.

We must have a system whereby people feel that they have ownership of the planning process and whereby they can have confidence in the decisions that are reached. That will ensure that we create plans that have the support of residents, are in the long-term interests of our community, will address real housing needs and will almost certainly create local economies that grow and prosper.