Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con) [V]]

I note that we, Madam Deputy Speaker, have just entered our 25th year of service in the House. In all that time, I have been clear that there is no more important issue to the residents of the constituency of Reigate than planning. Crucially, the protection of our environment hangs on the fact that we are London’s green belt.

I just want to pose a couple of warnings for my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench. They might have noticed that in the last set of local elections only the Borough of Reigate and Banstead remains a district or borough council in Conservative control. These cases almost always turn on people feeling disenfranchised and remote from the planning process. Unless things change, it is only going to get worse. There is also the issue—despite our right hon. Friend the Paymaster General’s machine-gunning at the Dispatch Box of the deputy Leader of the Opposition—of the noise around the developer connection with the Conservative party. The delivery of a developer-led system of house provision will haunt us in future if we do not address it.

I want to point my hon. Friend the Minister to the comments made by our hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) about enabling a plan-led system. If the local authority is coming forward with its own plans, of course it should not need planning permission. The local authority will have produced a plan, which developers would then bid to build.

Within that, however, we need a more important national debate about where housing is to go and about how we are to deliver levelling up so that we can get good houses, good jobs and good infrastructure in those parts of the country where people have drifted away—provincial towns in the midlands and the north—to seek employment elsewhere. I draw my hon. Friend the Minister’s attention to the excellent article in The Times today by our former leader, our noble Friend Lord Hague. We need to address the levelling-up agenda, and we can do it within the planning system, but if we do not, we will be in the deepest trouble, because we will not be able to deliver our principal political objectives.

I want to make two other points. First, I draw the attention of my hon. Friend and his colleagues in the Department to the concern about the building safety fund and how it affects the leaseholders of Nobel House. I have written to the Secretary of State urgently, and I have now had two letters from his colleague, the noble Lord Greenhalgh. Unhappily, the last letter, which arrived today, was in response to my letter to the Secretary of State of 17 December 2020—I did have a previous response to a letter I sent a month later—but this is now absolutely urgent. These leaseholders are in the deepest trouble because of the failure of Avon Estates properly to register a claim for the building safety fund and, indeed, for the waking watch fund.

Finally, on another element of the Queen’s Speech, the welcome ban on conversion therapy lacks any detail on how it will work. The accompanying notes imply that people who are inflicting it at the moment might get protected. We need assurance on that very shortly.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Nominations closed at 5 o’clock this afternoon for candidates for the post of Chair of the Backbench Business Committee. One nomination has been received, and a ballot will therefore not be held. I congratulate Ian Mearns on his re-election as Chair of the Backbench Business Committee.