Affordable Housing: Planning Reform

Christopher Pincher Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq, and to wind up this Westminster Hall debate. It has been thoughtful and considered, with detailed and useful contributions from Members from across the House. I hope that I will be able to pick up on the points made by Members, and occasionally I may refer to the excellent speech that has been provided to me by my officials.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) on his appointment to the shadow housing portfolio—a very important role indeed. I look forward to working with him as he attempts to keep us true, and to helping to persuade him of the righteousness of our approach, and I wish him well. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) on securing this important debate and making such a thoughtful contribution. I am sure that he will not stop promoting Cornwall or, for that matter, Devon. We want him to promote them, but we also want to ensure that his constituents have good quality, decent and affordable homes to live in.

I remind everybody of the importance of building more homes. The hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich spoke about other reasons and methods to ensure that we provide affordable homes, but fundamentally we have to build more homes if we are going to supply good quality homes in the places that people want. That is why over the last 10 years we have had programmes such as the affordable homes programme, under which hundreds of thousands of new properties have been built across our country. That is why we are using programmes such as Help to Buy, which has only recently provided its 300,000th instance of help to buy for Sam Legg and his partner, Megan, who bought a home in Asfordby in Leicestershire. Sam said that without the Help to Buy programme, he would not have been able to afford to get on to the property ladder. That is a dream that more than 80% of people, particularly those in the social and private rented sectors, say they want to achieve—the right to own, the right to buy and the right to acquire. They want to get themselves on to the property ladder.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives and several other colleagues—including my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) and the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard)—mentioned the importance of primary residences. I recognise the challenge that has been put to us, and it is one of the reasons why we have reformed stamp duty and increased the costs to foreign and international purchasers of British property. To the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes, it is why we will introduce a threshold for the business rate loophole tie-up, to ensure that only proper letters are letting their properties and making use of the business rate regime.

I am conscious that other Members have made points about council tax and the importance of local authorities having discretion over it. We have allowed local authorities to increase the council tax to 100% for second homes, but I will consider carefully the points that Members have made about local authorities having further discretion over their council tax regime.

The hon. Member for Bolsover (Mark Fletcher) spoke about First Homes, which the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport mentioned in a slightly different context. I was pleased to visit Bolsover a couple of weeks ago to give Nicky Bembridge, an NHS worker, the keys to his first home. As my hon. Friend pointed out, the First Homes regime is provided by developer contributions and it does not cost the taxpayer a penny. It means that local homes are available to local people at a discount of at least 30% off the market rate. Local authorities have the discretion to determine which residents will be eligible—it could be people who live locally, or people with skills that are missing from the area and are needed.

The First Homes product allows people to get on the property ladder, while covenanting the discount into the future so that future generations of local people or skilled workers, defined by the local authority, will be able to get on to the property ladder. I rather hope that if some First Homes are built in Plymouth, they can be built on the site of the former registry office, which I think is being demolished—thanks partly to £250,000 of brownfield funding that the Government are providing to Plymouth City Council to ensure that that work is done.

The hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) mentioned brownfield sites. We are absolutely committed to further development on brownfield land, and that is one of the reasons why we have introduced further funding for that purpose. In the recent Budget, £1.8 billion was made available for brownfield remediation, £300 million of which will be given to mayoral combined authorities. Greater Manchester has already benefited to the tune of more than £90 million of public money for brownfield remediation, and we look forward to going further in the future.

The hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) raised an important point about the time it takes to make local plans. She is perhaps more aware of that than most, because York has not had a local plan since 1956, when the present planning regime was barely eight years old.

We are very conscious of that challenge. If we are to get more developers, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, to build different types of property on different land packets to different tenures, we need a planning system that is far more transparent, predictable and speedy. I take on board the points made about the planning system by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, but I think we all recognise that it is far too slow. It can take seven years for a local plan to be produced, and a further five years for planning permissions to be granted and spades to go into the ground. That is far too long for SME developers that are living, quite literally, hand to mouth. We need a system that is far more predictable and speedy, and that will be the effect of our planning reforms, which I can assure the hon. Gentleman and the House we will introduce.

We also want to make the planning system far more engaging. It is very important that more people get involved in our planning system. It really is not very democratic that literally 1% of local people on average get involved in local plan making—that is more or less local planning officers and their blood relations. The percentage rises to a massive 2% or 3% of people getting involved in individual planning applications—still not enough. We need a system that is far more engaging, three-dimensional and digitised. That is what our planning reforms will provide.

By providing a digital planning system, we will free up local planning officers, giving them much more bandwidth to do the sort of strategic planning that they trained to do, that we want them to do and that communities need them to do, rather than focusing on the administration of agreeing that a dormer window can be put in a particular building. We will ensure that we have a faster and more accessible planning system. We have also committed ourselves to a review of the resourcing of local planning authorities to make sure that—quite apart from digitisation, which should increase their bandwidth—they have the wherewithal to do the work that we want them to do.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives raised the importance of skills and apprenticeships in our construction supply chain, a point also made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover. The Department for Education has made available some £2.7 billion for the purposes of apprenticeships, and innovative partnerships between the National House Building Council and developers such as Redrow have allowed for the development of bricklayer academies. One has opened in my constituency —I am sure it is just coincidence that they chose Tamworth.

The academies mean that the time it takes to train a bricklayer is cut in half. They also allow young people to see that there is a career in construction beyond bricklaying. They may be 19 and learning how to lay bricks, but they also learn that, by the time they are 30 or 35, they can do other things in the construction sector and they do not have to lay bricks for the rest of their working life. That encourages more people, and also more women, into the construction sector—a very important thing.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover raised the importance of infrastructure. That point was also made by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport. We recognise that, if we are to get more people to support our planning regime, they must have the infrastructure to support the homes that are built around or near them—the GP clinic, school, roundabout or kids’ play area. We know that the present system of section 106 agreements is loaded in favour of the developers, and that the bigger developers tend to have the bigger lawyers, with the bigger guns, who can drive down the will of local authorities to resist.

That system means that proposed infrastructure is often negotiated away, or does not arrive on time. We are going to introduce an infrastructure levy, and I hear the point made by many contributors that that ought to be as localised as possible. That levy will allow infrastructure to be built up front, when people want it and in a way that they expect. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover rightly said, if the infrastructure can be put in place, that will carry with it the hearts and minds of local communities, who will see that they will get some bang for their buck.

Members raised the issue of empty homes. There are sometimes good reasons that homes are empty—for example, if they cannot be repaired, if they are in the wrong place to meet demand or if they are not the right size for the people who most need them. However, I hear what colleagues have said. As I have already pointed out in my remarks about council tax and the consideration of further discretions, I will go away and ponder the points that have been raised by a significant number of Members.

I will make one final point, Dr Huq, before I make some concluding remarks.

[Munira Wilson]

Will the Minister give way?

[Christopher Pincher]

Before I make those remarks, I will allow the hon. Lady rapidly to intervene.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

The hon. Lady will have to be quick.

[Munira Wilson]

I want to pick up the point I made in my intervention, about the statutory duty placed on police forces to sell to the highest bidder police stations that are being closed, which therefore considers financial rather than social value. This is a problem not just for Teddington police station, but across London, where we have a real dearth of sites. Will the Minister look at changing national legislation so police forces can consider affordable housing bids?

[Christopher Pincher]

The hon. Lady makes an important point. I remind her that developer contributions can contribute to affordable homes being built in her locality, and that it is a Government obligation carefully to consider how public money is spent so as to ensure we get best value for it. I will certainly go away and consider the point she has raised.

I will say one quick thing about net zero, which a number of Members raised. The future homes standard, which we are to introduce in 2025, will mean that homes are built with materials and heating systems that make them at least 75% more carbon efficient than homes built to present standards. As a down payment on the 2025 date that we have set the sector, next year we will introduce an uplift in building regulations to ensure that homes are at least 31% more carbon efficient than homes built at present.

This has been an important debate, and I have been pleased to hear the contributions made by colleagues from across the Chamber. I hope I have given reassurances to Members as to the importance that the Government place on building good-quality, affordable homes around our country, where they are needed. Be they for ownership, shared ownership, affordable rent or social rent, we need more good-quality homes. That is one of the building blocks of levelling up. It is a mission that the Government have set me and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and one that we shall deliver.