Dan Rogerson
Main Page: Dan Rogerson (Liberal Democrat - North Cornwall)
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
I am particularly pleased to have secured this evening’s Adjournment debate, as it is on a very important aspect of Government policy that I now know needs to be developed. There were a number of welcome statements in the coalition agreement about the abolition of regional spatial strategies, shared equity accommodation, and the removal of garden grabbing from the planning system.
In my part of the world, the most important issue facing local communities is the lack of affordable housing for local people. It has bedevilled the area for decades but, if anything, the situation has become significantly worse in the last decade. We know that the planning system is fuelled primarily by greed rather than need: in those circumstances, it is difficult to design a system that enables need to be met, and I am particularly pleased to see that the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell), is here to respond to this important debate.
In the short time available to me, I intend to develop a number of issues, and I have a number of questions about what will happen with the supply side. The Government are to abolish the regional spatial strategies and the housing targets that go with them, so what role will development control play in meeting affordable housing need after that abolition?
With regard to planning policy statement 3, I believe that there will be an increasing number of questions about the integrity of exception sites and about maintaining that integrity, especially in rural areas. In addition, I know that my hon. Friend the Minister will be keen to respond to what I believe is widespread concern about how some elected members of planning committees are finding themselves at risk of predetermination in the consideration process.
Other supply-side questions have to do with the management and regulation of the private rented sector, its relationship with the housing benefits system, and whether there should be formal regulation of landlords and letting agents. On the demand side, I particularly want to probe the Government’s approach to the control of second homes—something that has a significant impact on communities in my constituency and many other areas around the country. I also want to discuss the Government’s attitude to property taxation, given the earlier announcement of the extension of capital gains tax and the impact that that is likely to have on the private rented sector in particular.
On the abolition of regional spatial strategies, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has embellished the previous coalition agreement statement with his own statement. On 3 June, he said that
“the new Government has announced it will abolish Labour’s unelected Regional Assemblies, top-down building targets and unwanted Regional Spatial Strategies.”
In my part of the world, the housing stock has more than doubled in the last 40 years. In fact, the area is one of the fastest growing places in the UK, yet the housing needs of local people have got dramatically worse over that period. The previous Government’s approach of adding another 70,000 houses in a place like Cornwall, which is what they proposed in the regional spatial strategy over 16 years—as if somehow, by magic, that would address the housing needs of local communities—is disproved by the way the market has operated in the past 40 years. We need a much more sophisticated approach if we are to address the deep-seated, endemic and serious housing problems in such a place as Cornwall. Simply turning it into a developers’ paradise is not the answer.
The Secretary of State went on in his letter:
“In contrast to Labour’s regime of targets, we will be seeking to introduce new incentives to reward councils which build more homes and support local business growth.”
The question really is how the Government intend to do that. If fewer private market houses are to be heaped in where it is not helpful in places like Cornwall, which I would welcome, does that mean that the Government will introduce a system driven more by need than demand? If that is the case, would the outcome be that in places like Cornwall a higher proportion of any new development would be affordable housing to meet local housing need than was originally the case in the previous Government’s regional spatial strategy?
On the wider implications of development control in meeting the need for affordable housing, sometimes the best way of meeting local housing need is to have strict control on housing development, although that sounds counter-intuitive, especially in rural areas such as Cornwall. Then one can apply the exceptions approach not only in rural areas but perhaps in others. Often the value of the land is determined by the planning process and what that land can be used for. That determines ultimately whether we can achieve the ultimate goal of developing affordable housing.
The role of the intermediate market is developed in the coalition agreement. Shared ownership accommodation is encouraged, which is something that I warmly welcome. That is encouraging. The coalition agreement says that we will
“promote shared ownership schemes and help social tenants … own or part-own their own home”,
but how will we do that? There is a serious lack of mortgage finance to develop a meaningful intermediate market. In places like Cornwall it is vital that we create a new rung on the housing ladder for people at the very bottom who cannot make the enormous jump on to the first rung of the private market.
Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and congratulate him on obtaining this debate so early in the new Parliament. In talking about definitions and the Government’s policy, does he agree that “affordable” housing can sometimes be used by developers to provide housing for sale that is still very much unaffordable to local people? It is discounted when compared to the full market price, but really socially rented accommodation would do the most to bite into that need in our communities.
Andrew George
My hon. Friend is right to suggest that we need a lot more social rented accommodation, but much of the pressure on that accommodation is from people who might otherwise get on to the intermediate rung of the housing ladder. I am keen that we should develop that. The problem is the lack of mortgage finance. Only three lenders are currently lending, and in order to get schemes to go ahead it is necessary to have all three lenders on a site. With that, of course, comes significant pressure for relaxation of the section 106 agreements, which often go alongside such developments.
Before I was elected I was a rural housing enabler before such things were properly invented. I was involved in many of the kind of developments that have taken place since the early 1990s as a result of what was then PPG3 and is now PPS3. We found exception sites. What I found then, and has been found since that time, is that it is easier to find exception sites where the development value is significantly less than £10,000 a plot. People were finding it a great deal cheaper than that in the early 1990s. Such sites could be taken forward in an environment in which the integrity of the planning system was maintained. Otherwise, the hope value on all those sites will be lost.
Rural exception sites—also known as departure sites—are sites beyond or close to defined settlements. Exception sites are acceptable for the provision of 100% affordable housing but not for the provision of open market housing. Often such schemes consist of fewer than 20 houses—more often than not, far fewer. It is very important indeed, , as PPS3 states, that:
“Rural exception sites should only be used for affordable housing in perpetuity.”
The problem is that there is pressure from some local authorities to weaken, or lessen, the pressure on that. I therefore urge my hon. Friend the Minister to ensure that the integrity of the exceptions approach in PPS3 is retained. That has been supported—I spoke to Matthew Taylor before he produced his report last year—by the Taylor review, the Affordable Rural Housing Commission, the rural housing trusts and all the housing charities that work in this field. It is vital that such sites provide affordable housing in perpetuity 100%. There is a risk that we might lose that.
I mentioned predetermination; I shall be interested to hear what the Minister says on that. There is concern among many elected members; they feel unable to campaign on the issue before they are elected, in case, once they have expressed a view about the way in which their local community might or should develop, it would restrict what they might be permitted to do on a planning committee. A statement on that would therefore be particularly helpful.
I mentioned housing benefit. In areas such as mine, where a large proportion of the local community live on the very margins of economic survival, because of the very high private rents those people often depend on the housing benefit system whether they are in or out of work. The problem is that the system as it operates at the moment still results in the withdrawal of housing benefit at the rate of about 85p in the pound earned for people in that situation. If that is the case, clearly there are a lot of people, particularly in areas such as mine, who are going in and out of work who suffer from that mechanism and a housing benefit system that does not take fully into account the difficulties of living at that level. As a result, a lot of people living in my part of the world, and many other places, are living in awful accommodation, which certainly does not meet national standards, and are often paying very high rents indeed.
In my area there are some excellent private landlords and the private rented sector is run extremely well, but of course there are some who do not run it as well as perhaps they should. For example, one family that I was seeking to help earlier this year during the very cold winter, who were living in a one-bedroom flat up some stairs and had a one-year-old baby boy—the mother had epilepsy—found themselves in and out of both accommodation and the working environment and were unable to maintain the housing benefit at rental levels. They found themselves under a great deal of pressure from their letting agent at the time. I will quote from a letter that the letting agent, Antony Richards Property Services, sent to my constituents, a Mr Shaun Burden and Ms Rosemary Jarmain, who were living in Morrab road at the time. They have since been housed by the council in accommodation in Newlyn.
The letting agent wrote:
“In the absence of any rent forthcoming and your apparent refusal to help yourselves by providing the information…we are left with no alternative but to seek to enforce the possession notice served last year…the Council will deem you as intentionally homeless and are highly unlikely to offer you accommodation. You will then be homeless.
The choice is yours.
I am told the streets are cold at night.”
Such treatment of local families in a desperate situation is not acceptable.
Adverts for Homechoice in Cornwall have shown that this week, of the 42 properties available, 14 are one-bed, 21 are two-bed, six are three-bed and one is four-bed. In Cornwall, there is a serious shortage of family accommodation—three and four-bed accommodation.