Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Second sitting)

Craig Tracey Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 18th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Jim McMahon]

Q During your introduction, you said that part of the reason why the amendments were so late in coming was actually change of positions and looking at the Bill with a fresh pair of eyes, and that was the result. Given the tone of the contribution, I take that at face value, and I appreciate the comments that you have made.

When you were looking at the Bill and at opportunities to enhance it further, did you consider the roles of listed buildings in that? In my constituency, we have a very old mill—apparently one of the oldest mills with a concrete floor, if anyone is interested in those kinds of things—but it is a blight on the local community. Last year, there was the death of an 18-year-old, who fell through the floors, because the mill is so unsafe. The fire service, the council and the police have all put a notice on the building, because it is absolutely liable to cause another death very soon, but its heritage value for the experts in London, who do not have to live in its shadow, maintains that it should stay there. It is scuppering development on the site—a £248 million tram system runs alongside it, with a station there ready for development. Did you consider that the process is stifling the development of what should be attractive places to live?

Gavin Barwell: The simple answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question is that that is not an issue that I have looked at in particular, but if he wants to write to me to set out his concerns, I would be very happy to take that forward. He knows his community and what the issues are, better than anyone who is adjudicating on such things from a distance. I am very happy to help him to get that issue resolved.

[Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)]

Q I want to pick up very quickly on something that Mr Thomson from the CPRE talked about, which was about councils having to chip away at the green belt to deliver the provision. He mentioned that often they do not feel that they are getting the backing of the Secretary of State. I am aware that several local authorities in my area have jointly commissioned a report to grade areas of green belt, based on the extent to which they make all five functions in the NPPF. They are basically suggesting that some areas do not have as much value as others, and they are planning to use the report to recommend parcels that can be used to facilitate building. So there still seems to be a lot of confusion in local councils about how the green belt rules are applied. Is there any provision in the Bill to strengthen that? The former Housing Minister was great and came to my constituency to explain to one of the councils how things needed to be implemented, but it still does not seem to be filtering through, and I am guessing that that could be the case in a lot of councils.

Gavin Barwell: At the moment, there is nothing in the Bill that touches directly on the green belt. What I would say to my hon. Friend is that the national planning policy framework is very clear on this. Basically, there are two issues: one is how an authority deals with an application for development on the green belt. Essentially, with the exception of certain very limited uses, which are defined in the NPPF, development is inappropriate in the green belt. The second issue and the one to which he is alluding, I think, is when you want to change the boundaries of your green belt. The NPPF has a very clear presumption against doing that, too. It should only happen in exceptional circumstances, and one of the features of green belt should be its permanence.

What we asked local authorities to do—again, I think it is very important that these decisions should in most cases be made locally—is to assess objectively the need for housing in their area. When they have done that, they need to look at how they can meet that need. It is certainly possible that there are authorities for whom meeting that need without making use of prime agricultural land, green belt or some other kind of protected land is not possible. It is then a judgment for them about what they should do. They might decide, “We will release some land and make some changes to our local plan in order to meet the need.” However, they might decide, “Actually, we don’t believe that it will be possible to meet this level of need without having too detrimental an effect on these particular sites, therefore we will provide for less than our level of need,” and when an authority does that—the hon. Member for City of Durham has now left the room—it should certainly be having conversations with neighbouring authorities about whether they are able, through the duty to co-operate, to take up some of the slack.

The inspector’s job is to test whether authorities have applied that policy correctly. There are examples of local plans in which an inspector has accepted an authority’s judgment that it is not able to meet the full level of need for those kinds of reasons, and for others the inspector has said, “Actually, no, there are other things that you could have looked at, but didn’t look at. You need to go back and look at them.” Some people think that there is an automatic presumption that the green belt can never be a justification for not meeting the full level of need, but that is not true; nor is it true that it automatically is either, if you see what I mean. The test is there in the NPPF, but the circumstances have to be exceptional.

[Craig Tracey]

Q As a quick follow-on question—where a constituency like mine comes under pressure, because we are a rural constituency surrounded by big areas we are having to co-operate with, what are the mechanisms for challenging their assessed need? That is where the calculation figures are often seen to be well away from what we would expect.

Gavin Barwell: One of the things I was alluding to for Mr Malthouse was whether we can look at a more objective method of saying what need is. The starting point, it seems to me, is the household projection figures. One of the concerns people raise with that is that we have taken the decision we took on 23 June, so migration levels may well be lower. It is worth saying that what the projection numbers do is look at past trends and roll forward, so they are already assuming a reduction in the level of migration over the time period and they are updated every few years.

The starting point, as I said, is those household projection figures. Then if I were running a council, I would be looking at what the market is telling me. In other words, what is the ratio of house prices to salaries in my area? If that ratio is very high, we have not been building enough houses; so we need to do a bit more than the household projects would suggest, if we are going to try to get that ratio down. To me, those are the two things you would be looking at, but if what is being said is that it would be helpful to have more certainty about what those numbers are, and to have more confidence in them, I agree with that and that is something we are looking to do.

[Mrs Villiers]

Q Obviously the key concern that has been raised by some of the campaign groups, such as the Campaign to Protect Rural England, is that local authorities are being driven to propose green belt development because they cannot meet their targets and they cannot make the duty to co-operate work. So in order to avoid the risk of having their local plan rejected altogether they are putting forward green-belt or greenfield developments. What is the incentive on a local authority—on the other end of a duty to co-operate —to accept somebody else’s housing targets? I do not see how the duty to co-operate can work effectively if you are saying that local authorities have to somehow persuade their neighbours to accept their housing needs. I would be grateful if you could explain how the duty to co-operate is supposed to work.

Gavin Barwell: There are some local authorities that genuinely want to go for growth, and therefore they are almost happy to take extra housing because they have made a strategic choice that that is what they want to do in their district. Those are probably not the kinds of authorities in the areas my right hon. Friend and I represent or the areas immediately around them, where land is very much at a premium. One of the things we need to look at in the White Paper is what more we can do to provide those kinds of incentives. To me, a lot of that is about much more explicit links between housing numbers and infrastructure. I actually want to get down to the level of having very bespoke conversations with individual authorities saying, “If you were going to take an extra x thousand in your area, what does it need to make it work? What would make it politically acceptable?” and then trying to have those kinds of bespoke deals.

There is also a real role for all of us to provide some political leadership here. What many people imagine is that if we do not build the homes, the people will not come. Actually, evidence in London in recent years shows that that is not true; they do come, and you end up with people living in beds in sheds at the end of gardens and things like that. We do not want to live in a city like that, so Mr Tracey is absolutely right—we need to have confidence in the numbers and we need to believe that they are genuinely what is going to happen in a given area. But then there is a moral duty on us to make sure that we provide housing, once we have confidence in the figures, to meet that level of need.

Sometimes that is going to involve difficult choices. I have tried to avoid being parochial so far, but I will just give a Croydon example. In my constituency—it has been really interesting to see over the nearly 20 years that I have been involved in local politics—essentially an explicit choice has been made to build very high in the centre of Croydon in order to protect our green belt. If someone had come to Croydon 20 years ago and said, “We are going to have seven or eight buildings over 40 storeys in the town centre,” they would have been laughed out of town. Confronted with either not meeting the housing need we have—people can see the housing need all around them—or building on our remaining parks or green belt, people have actually said that this is a better option. It is near where the infrastructure is—the East Croydon station route into London and all those kinds of things.

In some parts of the country there are no easy ways of doing this. It is a question of having an honest debate about what the options are. I certainly believe that in parts of London higher density is part of the solution. Even that is not an easy sell to people because it does change the character of an area, but we need to think—what are the alternatives?