Housing Developments: West Sussex

Christopher Pincher Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith) on what I think we all agree was a finely crafted and balanced speech. I congratulate him on securing the debate and also on securing the interests of other hon. and right hon. Members. I note in particular the as ever eloquent speeches by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and also by my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), who made very kind remarks—at least about me.

I also note the interest my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs has secured from other colleagues. I see around us my hon. Friends the Members for Mid Sussex (Mims Davies), for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), for Crawley (Henry Smith) and for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart), as well as a few interlopers from a little further afield in Berkshire, Hampshire and Leicestershire: my hon. Friends the Members for Bracknell (James Sunderland), for Winchester (Steve Brine) and for Harborough (Neil O'Brien). I am very pleased they have made the time to attend this debate.

I am particularly interested in the interest of my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs in housing and planning matters, and I am pleased to speak on some of the issues that he and others have raised this evening. He drew particular attention to the calculation for local housing need, as did others, and I think it is worth me spending a minute before I go into the detail of my speech just to remind the House of the history of the local housing need calculation, which began some six or seven years ago. From memory, it had to be revised in about 2017 to look more closely at households. Due to the challenges there have been, we committed earlier this year to revisit it with a consultation yet again. That is why the consultation is taking place now. We should disaggregate that from the consultation that has taken place on our wider planning reforms in the planning White Paper, but I entirely understand why my hon. Friend and others have wished to raise the local housing need calculation.

The local housing need calculation is driven, as properly it should be, primarily on the question of affordability. There are places in our country where affordability is low and prices are high—sometimes income is low, too—and in those places it is difficult for people, particularly local people, as mentioned by some of my hon. Friends, to find accommodation locally. We must not lose sight of the other levers that affect the local housing need calculation: the importance of levelling up and improving stock in those parts of our country that most need it; and, the importance of focusing on more brownfield development and the better use of our town centres. We are mindful of those considerations, and we will consider them carefully and closely as a result of the consultation and the submissions made to it.

     My hon. Friend also drew attention to the planning White Paper and our proposed planning reforms. I want to take this opportunity to reassure him and other Members not least about our very real aspiration to leave the environment better than we found it as a result of the White Paper. It is clear that things have to change, because under the last Labour Government, house building fell to its lowest peacetime rate since the 1920s. That is why this Government have delivered more than 1.5 million additional homes since 2010 as part of our commitment to reverse that trend. We built more than 241,000 in England last year alone, and we can be rightly proud of these achievements, yet despite this progress, we are still not building enough homes. That is why we made a manifesto commitment to build more.

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

Would the Minister then consider that maybe the reason we have done so well in West Sussex and other parts of England since we have been in office is that we have local plans in place delivering new houses, and that maybe our focus should be on areas such as Eastleigh, part of which I represent, that do not have a local plan, and on the 1 million or so planning permissions that have been granted but not built? Maybe if we focused on those two, we would continue to make the progress that he has rightly celebrated at the Dispatch Box.

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making those points. I will not make specific reference to any particular local plan, but it is worth noting that the consolidated local plans, as they are constituted, provide for only 180,000 new homes, which is well below our commitment to build 300,000 new homes a year by the middle of this decade, and below the number that were produced last year. It is for that very reason that we are introducing, as defined in our White Paper, the sorts of reforms that we believe will allow for more building in the right places, in the right style and to the right standard that people want.

Our vision for the future of planning and house building is bold and ambitious and it is set out in our White Paper, “Planning for the Future”. Its purposes are essential. It proposes important changes to the focus and processes of planning to secure better outcomes in terms of land for homes, beauty and environmental quality. Simplifying the role of local plans will be a big part of this. It will be easier to identify areas suitable for housing development and for renewal, and areas that should be protected. These changes will transform a system that has long been criticised as being too slow to provide housing for families, key workers and young people, and too weak in getting developers to pay their fair share towards supporting infrastructure such as schools, roads and clinics. Our reforms will provide for more building on brownfield land, which my hon. Friend and others have mentioned, while valuing green spaces will be important and will continue to be protected. The consultation on the White Paper runs until 29 October 2020, and I hope that all our constituents will take the opportunity to engage in that process.

Our national housing challenge also requires powerful local responses, because local authorities have a key role to play. It is reasonable to expect them to meet their share of the nation’s future housing needs. That is why we ask authorities to plan to meet the full housing need of their communities, to identify enough land to meet that need and to take an active role in delivering homes in their areas. Although the presumption in favour of sustainable development may apply where an authority cannot identify sufficient land for housing or where delivery falls below a certain level, we are clear—crystal clear—that decisions will still need to be made in the light of all the policies in our national planning policy framework. That includes policies that seek to protect an area from unwanted developments, such as the strong protections for the South Downs National Park.

Local and neighbourhood plans will also play a key role as they have a number of important functions, including setting out what development an area needs, ensuring that it is supported with the right infrastructure and, crucially, ensuring that local decisions remain at the heart of the planning system. Our proposal for protecting areas in local plans in “Planning for the future” would justify more stringent development controls to ensure sustainability in areas subject to significant flood risk or other environmental factors, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs alluded. Taken together, local and neighbourhood plans help ensure that developments that are planned and sustainable, not sporadic and speculative, are developed. I am pleased that 90% of councils have adopted a local plan—one or two still have not, as has been mentioned by some of our colleagues. That is compared with just 17% in 2010. I am delighted that there have now been more than 900 successful neighbourhood planning referendums across England. I am certainly encouraged by the work being undertaken by the communities in West Sussex to update their local plans and drive forward the number of adopted neighbourhood plans in the area.

As we move to transform our planning system, we are looking carefully at those areas that have long been a source of local objections. This evening, I will touch on just three: the need to protect the environment; a lack of critical infrastructure; and the need for high quality design. The first, environmental protection, is a subject close to all our hearts. A number of Members have mentioned it. I want to reassure my hon. Friend and other hon. and right hon. Friends that our reforms will not be at the expense of our natural environment. Through our NPPF, we have made it clear that planning policies and decisions should minimise the effects on biodiversity of developments and provide net gains. That means opportunities to incorporate biodiversity improvements in and around developments should be sought, especially where that can be secured and offer secure, measurable net gains for biodiversity, but we also want to go further, which is why, in our forthcoming Environment Bill, we will make biodiversity improvements mandatory for a range of development, including house building.

This will ensure that future planning applications include an assessment of the existing biodiversity quality of land and details of the improvements that are proposed to be made. The NPPF also makes it clear that planning policies should encourage the take-up and prioritisation of suitable brownfield land, especially for new homes. All authorities now publish a local register of brownfield land suitable for housing, bringing thousands of hectares of developable land to the attention of house builders. Our brownfield remediation fund announced at the Budget, which provided £400 million for brownfield development—initially, those proposals were focused on mayoral combined authorities—has demonstrated a very fat pipeline of brownfield sites. I look forward to more being brought forward and other opportunities that we can work together to develop, because I want to underline today that planning permission for major development in areas like the South Downs national park should be refused, other than in exceptional circumstances and where development is shown to be in the public interest.

Another source of local objections is the lack of critical infrastructure, and that the infrastructure comes too little or too late. That was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, among others. That is why we committed in our manifesto to amend planning rules, so that infrastructure comes before people move into their homes. As a part of that, we are investing £10 billion through the single housing infrastructure fund to provide the infrastructure to support new homes, so that infrastructure comes forward quickly and appropriately. Moreover, we have made £5.5 billion available through the housing infrastructure fund to provide the infrastructure to unlock up to 650,000 homes in areas of greatest need. We are consulting on a new uniform flat-rate infrastructure levy, consolidating existing developer contribution mechanisms—the community infrastructure levy or section 106—to deliver the local infrastructure needed to support people and places. It is a truly radical reform, simplifying processes while making sure developers pay their way.

Finally, we know how important high quality design is to communities. Often it is the most tangible thing people see when they see developments going up around them. We know that people will be less likely to oppose new development if the quality of the local area is improved at the same time. Reflecting the recent report of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, our reform proposals make beautiful places a central objective for planning. We intend to create a fast-track system for beautiful buildings, with local design guidance to help developers build and preserve beautiful communities. At its heart will be effective community engagement, because community input at this stage of preparing plans and design codes will give local people real influence over the location and the design of new developments, rather than having to react to unexpected planning applications. I want planning to be proactive, to be strategic, to be up-front, not tactical, not reactive, not rearguard as it all too often is at present and has been for too long.

In closing, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs for convening us on this important topic and allowing so many Members of the House to make eloquent speeches or contributions. I have listened keenly to those distinguished contributions tonight. I believe we all recognise the crucial need for homes for young people in West Sussex and across the country: homes in sustainable and well-designed communities, homes with the infrastructure that is ready to go, and homes that ensure our beautiful countryside and heritage all around the country—in Staffordshire, of course, but in West Sussex in particular—is protected, preserved and enriched in the decades to come. I am confident that together we can achieve it.

Question put and agreed to.