National Planning Policy Framework

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt). I will try to cover four aspects of the NPPF in just short of four minutes. The first is what the NPPF says on intentional unauthorised development. I welcome the move towards stronger wording in that area. I should stress that I am not talking about a house extension or somebody accidentally not complying with regulations, but entire new dwellings and wilful non-compliance. I welcome the move from material consideration, as it is known, to substantial weight, but I fear it does not go far enough. As I said in my submission to the consultation, it should be set out very clearly that

“wilfully ignoring planning consent requirements will not result in retrospective planning permissions being granted”,

and that this cannot in normal circumstances be overridden by personal circumstance arguments. Other things could be done in support, such as making sure that stop notices are easier to issue, and restrictions on things like delivery of construction materials and mobile homes to unlawful sites.

The Minister and I have discussed the NPPF housing formula many times across this Floor. He is a very diligent Minister and, although he always robustly defends the Government line, which is kind of annoying, he always does it with great courtesy. I thank him for that. The problem is that this formula has meant a massive increase in housing numbers for the countryside. It is not a north-south thing; it is an urban to countryside shift. Whereas the numbers have gone up by 50% for the country overall, in East Hampshire they have doubled. When that happens overnight, no one has a five-year land supply that can deal with it, so we get speculative developments.

That has been brought into sharp relief by the issue of water supply, which has particularly come to prominence since South East Water’s submission to the Basingstoke and Deane local plan. The Basingstoke area that it talks about—zone 4, as it is known—extends to Alton and around my constituency. The Environment Agency has stopped the extension of the abstraction licence at Greywell Fen because of the degradation of that globally rare site of special scientific interest. I met South East Water recently to discuss this. There are questions outstanding, particularly regarding parts of my constituency. Clearly, action should have happened before now, but a doubling of the housing target hugely exacerbates the issue. Large- scale development should not go ahead unless and until this issue is resolved.

[Jim Shannon]

I commend the right hon. Gentleman on his speech. I know that the Minister is not responsible for my constituency across the water, but does the right hon. Gentleman feel that recommendations and good things learned on the mainland should be shared with us back home to ensure that we do not have the same problems that seem to be repeating over and over again here?

[Damian Hinds]

I agree. There is no practical limit on what we can learn from one another in the home nations of the United Kingdom.

I want to come on to what is known as policy L3, which concerns the minimum density requirements for areas around train stations. I have written about this in my submission to the consultation. I fear that a policy that is, on the face of it, sensible—“Let’s have people living close to train stations where they can commute to work or whatever it might be”—is really designed for urban town areas. But it will also have an impact on market towns in places like East Hampshire and in villages that just happen to have a train station. The sorts of densities discussed in the NPPF would be wholly inappropriate for market towns like Alton in East Hampshire and rural villages like Bentley or Rowland’s Castle.

Finally, I want to address how the NPPF interacts with local government reorganisation. I am totally opposed to the Government’s top-down reorganisation of Hampshire local government for multiple reasons, including the fact that it splits up an area with an identity—namely, East Hampshire. It puts the lower parts into a new Portsmouth super-council area and the rest of East Hampshire into this vast new Mid Hants unitary. Local plans have been built around existing district council geographies. For councils that are part-way through the process and about to have this enormous reorganisation thrust upon them, what is the guidance from the Government on how they should proceed?

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

Three-minute limit!