Rural Housing Targets

Debate between Damian Hinds and Andrew George

Wednesday 29th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds]

My right hon. Friend makes an interesting point. In fact, there is a good example of that in my constituency, on a much smaller scale. Those schemes can materially improve amenity: we can make a better-looking housing estate and add facilities, such as a shop, even a pub, a better children’s playground and so on, that can benefit everyone.

Hon. Members will be pleased to hear that I am coming to the end of my speech. I do not want to overstate matters: the South Downs national park authority does build houses. In fact, it builds more houses, or plans for more houses, than other national park authorities. It co-operates and communicates with East Hampshire district council. However, we still end up with this imbalance, which is bad for both the part inside and the part outside the national park. Quite apart from the question of balance, there is also the question of public confidence, democratic accountability and responsiveness —people knowing how the numbers have been derived, rather than the council effectively having to be a number-taker, as it were, because of the decisions of another group.

My primary ask of the Minister is that he look again at how numbers are distributed between urban areas and the countryside overall. However, I also ask him to look again at how the calculations work in areas such as mine, so that we do not have demand calculated for the entire district with supply going mostly, although not entirely, to one part of it. That could be rectified in different ways. One would be to give district councils total clarity on how they can adjust their method for calculating need without running an excessive risk of the plan being found to be unsound. There is guidance—the Minister may have this in his notes—but here is what it says:

“The standard method should be used to assess housing needs. However in the specific circumstances where an alternative approach could be justified, such as those explained at paragraph 014”,

on national parks,

“consideration will be given to whether it provides the basis for a plan that is positively prepared, taking into account the information available on existing levels of housing stock and housing affordability.”

I do not know about you, Ms Jardine, but I am not sure I could explain to somebody else what that means. If we are going to have guidance, fine, but it has to be clear and it has to give confidence to councils and councillors, who, at the end of the day, are managing public money, that they are not running a serious risk of ending up in court proceedings when trying to do the right thing.

This could be done in other ways. It could be done by having the national park explicitly and transparently set a housing target for the entirety of its area, leaving the individual districts to work it out for themselves. That could be done either individually for each district, or just for the park as a whole.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman has not mentioned the rural exceptions policy. He is talking about rural housing, but to achieve the outcome he is describing, surely he should be advancing rural exception schemes. There is massive hope value on the edges of towns and villages if the targets are high, but rural exception schemes can keep the development land price down by ensuring that those developments meet local need.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. In both his incarnations, he has long been a campaigner on these issues. There are many housing and development issues that I would love to talk about, but I am running out of time talking about just these three, so I hope he will forgive me if I stick to them. However, I agree about the potential of the exceptions policy.

I have one further question to the Minister. With devolution and local government reorganisation, how and when will some of the issues change because we are looking at things on different boundaries? I am grateful to him for agreeing to meet me and my district councillors to talk about the national parks issue, but I hope he will fully consider all the points I have raised today.