Planning and Housing Supply

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Brady, and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (David Rutley). I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson), and for St Albans (Mrs Main), and my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), on securing this important debate, which is particularly important to residents of East Hampshire—especially, at present, residents of Four Marks, the parish of Medstead, Liphook, Alton, Petersfield and the area in and around Bordon and Whitehill. I want to focus on two aspects of the issue that my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs set out clearly and convincingly: the need for recognition of in-progress plans; and the insistence on accompanying infrastructure where permissions are granted.

Like those of many other areas, our plan was stopped in its tracks. In our case it was stopped at the stage of the joint core strategy between East Hampshire district council and the South Downs national park authority, and we now find ourselves in the void period that many hon. Members have spoken about, which can last a long time. The concern is that in that long time, until things are finalised, there is a risk—we already see the signs—of a flood of speculative applications.

I should say that East Hampshire district council is not anti-development, and nor am I. There is concern that the average first-time buyer in East Hampshire is 40 years old, and that the average home costs £321,000. We also recognise the need for market towns and villages to have vibrant, diverse communities. If we want to save what is left of our village pubs and shops, we need people to work in them, and our small primary schools need young families with children to go to them. The council also supports a substantial development on former Ministry of Defence land at Whitehill and Bordon; my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) spoke about his area’s eco-town, and this is ours. In the case of Bordon, the development will add 2,700 homes. East Hampshire also has a very ambitious self-set target for affordable homes.

In its interim housing statement, in this void period, East Hampshire reflects the revised strategic housing market assessment, or SHMA—I think I am the first speaker this afternoon to say that, although I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) mentioned the SHLAA—the strategic housing land availability assessment. The SHMA called for between 500 and 650 homes per annum, and East Hampshire is working towards the figure of 582, which is of course in the top half of that range.

In some places, the speculative applications and pre-application interest shown already exceed the targets in the areas and villages concerned for the period until 2028, and in my constituency that is especially true in Four Marks, the parish of Medstead, Alton and Liphook. There has also been significant interest in Petersfield, where a neighbourhood plan is in development; we expect the referendum on that next year. I suggest to the Minister that where a council is making proactive efforts, once the number of houses called for in the interim housing statement—in our case—has been reached in a particular area, it ought to be possible to say, “No more.”

A complication is that part of my constituency is in a national park—the relatively newly formed South Downs national park—and other parts have special protection area status, which leaves people who are in neither feeling somewhat exposed. We need a balance of development and a balance of community throughout the area. I strongly suggest that the elected local council is best placed to determine how the balance should be struck, and the interim housing statement seems to be a good way to express that. In general, residents’ concerns are twofold: first, they are concerned about the general scale of development and its implications for the character of an area; and secondly, they are concerned about the infrastructure deficit. Already, certain parts have seen significant infrastructure deficit. Four Marks has experienced a great deal of development, and needs commensurate infrastructure to ensure safety on the main road—the A31—sufficient primary places, and so on.

The approach is meant to be plan-led, so Ministers rightly say that the best thing that everybody can do is get on and make their plans. That is of course correct, but the plan process seems to take an inordinate amount of time, from beginning to end, and there must be ways to accelerate elements of it. We must recognise that many councils are not at the end of the process and find themselves in this void period. A large proportion of plan submissions in the first year of the national planning policy framework were found to be not sound. I therefore join strongly in the calls to make it explicit that infrastructure requirements should be met if permission is to be granted, the calls for emerging plans to be recognised, and the calls to find ways to speed up the whole process.

I shall strike a slightly different tone on the overall need for housing. I recognise that we need housing—the Office for National Statistics figure is 232,000 homes per year—but what is not necessarily well understood is that that is not all, or even nearly all, about immigration. If we strip out future net migration, the projected requirement is still 149,000: people are living longer; households are smaller, for all sorts of wider social reasons; kids live away at university and have a place at home; hardly anyone has a lodger anymore; and so on. There are lots of pressures, and they will not go away. The south-east will over-index on that pressure, and we must accommodate it but also mitigate it.

I encourage the Minister to work with councillors on how, on a relatively small scale in our local areas, we can do more about the conversion of redundant agricultural buildings; make granny flat conversions easier; work on empty properties, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury said; and take up small-site opportunities, as my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris) said clearly. An interesting point in the Portas report was about the opportunity to concentrate town centres. That has the benefit of freeing-up space on the relative periphery for residential development. On a bigger scale, there are new towns, but perhaps the biggest opportunity of all is the one touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew): we should not only build higher-density, in-town living, but make it attractive. Some of the most sought after areas of the country are high-density, which proves that it can, in principle, be done. I see that I am out of time, Mr Brady, so I will stop there.