New Housing Design

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I congratulate the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on raising this issue. It is a really big issue in my city. Those of us who know Cambridgeshire know that the view for people coming across the fens used to be just King’s College chapel and the university library—two different examples of architectural styles—but now they see cranes everywhere. The city is being rebuilt around us. Whether we are building homes that people can afford or repositories of value is perhaps a debate for another day. Today, I want to raise two particular issues, which have already been addressed.

A few weeks ago, I was taken to see a new house in Cambridge. Inevitably it was a very expensive new home. There was a line of houses, and one looked like a building site because the people who had moved in had found so many problems that it had literally needed to be torn apart from the inside—I had never seen anything like it. After they had done it once, they went back in and there were yet more problems, so it has been done twice. Those people have not been able to be in their new home for more than a year; their lives have been wrecked and ruined, and I suspect that the same issues exist elsewhere. I will not name the house builder today, because I live in hope that it may be encouraged to do the decent thing. Exactly as has been suggested, if people get a defective product in any other walk of life, they are given the opportunity to have their money back and go elsewhere. That is what the house builder should have provided in this case, and it should still do that in my view. That is not the only case, as we have heard. I have had others in my constituency, but that one was particularly shocking. I think that this is partly a matter of the attitude from the house builders and how they treat their customers.

If there is an individual problem, there is also a collective problem, because—as has been said—communities feel that they have been disempowered. There has been much talk lately of taking back control. From Cambridge’s perspective, the people in Brussels are pussycats compared with the house builders and developers who, in many people’s view, have not kept their side of the deal. If people come to Cambridge, they will see the new station development. Many promises were made many years ago, but as it goes down the line, things are taken out. Promises were made, and the local council does its best, but it is up against the power of the developers, who are, in many people’s view, letting people down. Right at the end was a delightful Victorian terrace. It would not have been much to ask of the developer to leave that for the people of Cambridge, but no, it had to go as well.

When I asked the former Secretary of State in the Lobby—there are of course many Cambridge people in this place—he shrugged and said, “Well, there’s not much I can do, either.” Talk about no control—the Secretary of State cannot do anything about it. The community cannot do anything about it, and in Cambridge there is no lack of engagement; it is a very engaged community. However, there is an imbalance of power.

The news is not all bad. There are some very good developments that have worked in Cambridge. On Saturday I am joining others to celebrate the opening of a very big new development in north-west Cambridge that has been developed with the University of Cambridge—Eddington. It will be a fantastic new development, particularly for post-doctorates, but I suspect that it has worked partly because the University of Cambridge is also a powerful player and has been able to deal with some of these issues, whereas the local community does not always have the same power.

On the issue of fighting back, I congratulate organisations such as BIMBY—“Not in my back yard” has been rejected by Beauty-In-My-Back-Yard. Organisations such as the Local Government Association and the National Trust are supporting that.

This is not just about engagement, but about the balance of power. That has to be addressed. There needs to be a new settlement between developers and house builders, and their customers and their communities.