amendment of the law

Lord Hanson of Flint Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Pickles]

My hon. Friend makes a very reasonable point. My own Department in central Government has reduced its running costs by 41% in real terms, so we have led by example.

The Government have set about turning things around. This is a complex area, and the solution requires action on multiple fronts. We have taken three important steps. First, we are radically reforming the planning system to crank up the engine and get things moving. Secondly, we are giving builders certainty so that they can get Britain building. Thirdly, we are intervening dramatically to help people step on to the first rung of the housing ladder. It may be helpful if I set out our approach to each of those issues.

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State tell me how under-occupancy relates to the mortgage relief schemes that the Treasury announced last week? If, for example, one individual buys a house with three bedrooms, will that person be subject to the under-occupancy tests that apply to those in social housing?

[Mr Pickles]

I think that only the Labour party would confuse taxation with entitlement to benefit. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, since coming to office we have made great play of the need to release a number of unoccupied houses, and thus far we have made quite a push towards that. Every household in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency is now paying £900 to subsidise housing benefit. If his council wants to pay more, it can do so.

[Mr Hanson]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mr Pickles]

No. The right hon. Gentleman has had his chance to intervene, and his intervention was not very good.

Let me deal first with our reforms of the planning system. Labour’s top-down, centralist approach built nothing but resentment. Its regional strategies added a layer of red tape that paralysed planning. By the time of the general election, six years after Labour’s Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, only one in six councils had adopted a core strategy and only one in four had a five-year land supply.

Nor did Labour’s approach lead to better co-ordination. The regional spatial strategies of the unelected regional assemblies contradicted the regional economic strategies of the unelected regional development agencies. Fortunately, the Localism Act 2011 is now scrapping Labour’s regional planning. The national planning policy framework has streamlined 1,000 pages of confusing Whitehall guidance and placed local plans in pole position—safeguarding the green belt, introducing a new protection for valuable green spaces, amending bureaucratic change-of-use rules to make it easier to get redundant and empty buildings back into productive use, and kick-starting brownfield regeneration.