House Building Targets

David Drew Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) for introducing the debate. The Minister will no doubt know what I am going to talk about because we have talked about it privately, but I will put it on the public record. He has been very helpful in his response, but I hope that he will be a little more helpful.

Stroud District Council wants to build more affordable houses and is prepared to accept a bigger housing number overall. It is particularly proud of its reputation for social housing. The problem is that, as it currently stands, the methodology makes it difficult for us to meet the numbers that we are now required to meet, which are well above the numbers in the plan that we negotiated a few years ago.

The current methodology starts with the average level of household growth projected over 10 years, which it then adjusts based on a relative balance between median house prices and earnings, with a larger adjustment for areas with higher ratios. It then caps the level of adjustment to 40% above the housing requirements adopted in the post- national planning policy framework local plans. That sounds a bit like gobbledegook, but it basically means that, in the case of Stroud in Gloucestershire, we now face an increase on our local plan from 448 a year up to 635 a year, which is a 39.3% increase. Tewkesbury and the Forest of Dean also face large increases but, quite bizarrely, Gloucester and Cheltenham face a decrease. They have always been somewhat in parallel with Stroud, so it seems bizarre that we have come up with a methodology that affects us in that way.

One thing that the Minister could look at is the five-year migration flow, which seems to make a dramatic difference. We accept the uplift in terms of the household projections because we have a larger population, but the affordability ratio has taken us from 503 to 635 a year, and that matters, because that makes things more difficult, rather than easier. The numbers mean bigger sites. Some of our good, smaller sites are not being brought forward.

There is also the issue—as the Minister knows well—of the viability assessment. I went to a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group for housing and planning. I was pleased to hear the Minister’s officials say that they are looking carefully at that and intend to make it much more transparent, including publishing section 106s, which would be a very good thing, because we have always had our suspicions about what happens to those behind the scenes.

The additional problem is that we are still included within the same rent allowance area as Gloucester, which means that, because rents are higher in Stroud, people are faced with a top-up. I know that the Minister will not have the chance in this short debate, but I would appreciate it if he looked carefully at disaggregating rent level areas again, because otherwise it makes it punitive for those who want to rent in Stroud but cannot afford to pay the top-up.

In conclusion, we need to produce more housing. Everyone is pushing the Minister towards more housing. The Government have the laudable aim of building between 270,000 and 300,000 new homes. We will do our part in Stroud, but we cannot rely just on the larger sites. We have two bids in for the garden communities—I do not know if the Minister will address where those bids have got to—but I suspect that we do not have the capability or the capacity to deliver one of them, let alone both, because of the numbers required.

My plea to the Minister is to look at how the calculation has been arrived at, to give us more realism, so that we can play our part but do not end up with a huge shortfall, which will end up being hammered at the next local plan stage. That would seem unfair, given that we have tended to meet our level of housing in the past and would like to do so in future.