Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Christopher Pincher Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

We have had a spirited debate. We have also had a sombre one when hearing from my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris). I am sure that the hearts of all in the House go out to that little boy, George Hinds, and his family and the community in Heysham for the terrible tragedy that they have suffered.

We also heard from 58 other Back-Bench Members of the House. I particularly congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Wolverhampton South West (Stuart Anderson) and for Wolverhampton North East (Jane Stevenson) on their plug for the National Brownfield Institute, which I shall be visiting on Friday, as a physical manifestation of our commitment to brownfield first. The national planning policy framework says “brownfield first”; our fiscal stimulus, the £400 billion that we put into brownfield regeneration, financially demonstrates it; and we have instituted practical regulatory levers through our permitted development rights with controls changes to ensure that gentle densification using brownfield sites can most effectively occur.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Croydon North (Steve Reed) not so much on his speech, because it was as predictable as it was inaccurate, but on hanging on to his job on the Opposition Front Bench. We know that the deckchairs on Labour’s Titanic are much sought after, and we congratulate him on hanging on to his. He will make a magnificent and, I am sure, very loyal understudy to the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell).

At the heart of this Government’s pledge to unite and level up our country is an unwavering commitment not just to build back from the pandemic but to build back fairer, safer and better, and to build back more beautifully, as my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) and my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) both eloquently made clear. That commitment underpins our planning Bill as laid out in the Gracious Speech: a sensible transformation of our 73-year-old planning system helping us build those new homes and the vital infrastructure that communities need.

The simple truth is that our planning system has not been delivering the homes that we need for many years. It can take seven years to agree local housing plans and five years before a spade cuts the ground, and after all that time, and often after a great deal of local concern, nine in every 10 applications get approved anyway. It is also too slow, too complicated and too exclusive, and it needs to change. We will end the glacial pace of planning by mandating every council to have up-to-date local plans, as called for by my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey). With local plans providing greater certainty, more local people will be better engaged to have a say about the design of their neighbourhoods—what is built, where it is built, what it looks like and what infrastructure is required to support it. We will replace our old, analogue planning system with new, map-based systems fit for the digital age, as my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Damien Moore) asked.

I have heard very clearly the views of many Members across the House, including my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) and my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt), for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) and for Bracknell (James Sunderland), to name but a few, about the importance of providing good and effective incentives to make sure that developers build out the permissions that they have. We will ensure through our reforms that such incentives are available and that they work.

I am also committed to neighbourhood plans, which my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) raised. We want to make sure that they are rolled out into areas that are less rural, and into areas that extend further north where we do not see enough of them, so that they can be effective levers for local people to plan additional homes in their neighbourhoods.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset and my hon. Friends the Members for South West Devon (Sir Gary Streeter) and for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) rightly mentioned, we will never solve the generational problem of demand outstripping supply without dramatically increasing the number of homes built each year. We made good progress before covid-19, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made clear: in the year to 2020, approximately 244,000 homes were built—the seventh consecutive year in which net supply increased. That is a fantastic foundation for us to build towards our ambitious target of delivering 300,000 homes a year.

That progress is underscored by the £12 billion that we are investing in affordable housing—the highest single funding commitment for more than a decade, which will deliver 180,000 new affordable homes, of which 32,000 will be for social rent. Approximately half of those properties will be available through our new shared ownership model, allowing people to buy additional shares in their home, because two thirds of people in social housing aspire to buy their own home. It is this Government who will help them to realise their ambition.

Building back fairer means creating a true property-owning democracy in which everyone has a stake in their own home, their community and their country. That is why the Chancellor implemented the stamp duty holiday and extended it earlier this year; why we have brought forward the new mortgage guarantee scheme, helping thousands of first-time buyers; and why last Thursday we reached a milestone in turning generation rent into generation buy when the 300,000th Help to Buy home was sold to Sam Legg from Asfordby, who is just 19 years old. He was able to buy his first home with his partner Megan—something that, in Sam’s words,

“would not have been possible without Help to Buy.”

This Government are proud to be backing Sam, Megan and millions of people like them, including my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook), in realising their dreams of home ownership. We did it through Help to Buy and we are doing it through the right to buy and through our first home scheme, which will help first-time buyers to purchase their new home in their local community with a discount of at least 30%, and in some places up to 50%.

That is levelling up in action, extending home ownership and the prosperity that it brings to as many people as possible in all parts of our country, because we are proud of our country; we like our people. We do not despise it and despise them, as the Labour party always seems to. We want to put up homes for people like Sam and Megan so that they have a future. The Labour party wants to pull down statues to heroes like Churchill because it is fixated on the past.

We must recognise that there are some people who have found it difficult to get on with their lives. Nearly four years have passed since the tragedy of the Grenfell fire, and we owe it to the victims, the bereaved and their families to ensure that this country has one of the most rigorous and robust safety regimes in the world. The Gracious Speech confirmed that we will soon introduce the building safety Bill, delivering the greatest improvements to building safety in a generation.

Crucially, the Bill will place clear legal duties on those who build and manage new homes. It will establish a building safety regulator with robust enforcement powers, which will oversee new building work to ensure that risks are properly managed. First and foremost, we will put residents at the centre of the new system by creating a statutory residents’ panel.

The Bill will also restore confidence to leaseholders. We have always made it clear that building owners and the industry should make buildings safe without passing on costs to leaseholders. Where they have not stepped up, we have stepped in, investing £5.1 billion to remediate unsafe cladding on high-rise buildings. We have also instituted a generous finance scheme to support remediation on lower-rise buildings. It is an absolute priority of the Government, and we will bring forward our proposals for this as soon as we possibly can.

Ours is an unashamedly ambitious agenda set out in the Gracious Speech. We will build back fairer and safer and better. We will confront the building safety issues that no Government have dared to tackle and we will create a robust world-class system. We will level up communities the length and the breadth of our country. We have the overwhelming support of the people across the country from Accrington to Asfordby, from Hastings to Hartlepool, with the people behind us and the future before us. Brick by brick, home by home, we will build back Britain better.

Question put, That the amendment be made.